“I wanted to see if I could”: the role that challenged Monica Bellucci the most
Today, we are accustomed to witnessing models-turned-actresses permeating our screens. Think: Angelina Jolie, Demi Moore, Cameron Diaz. In utilising the catwalk as her own stable foundation in entering the cinema sphere, Monica Bellucci would become known for her roles in The Matrix franchise and has appeared most recently in the reboot of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Having helmed a storied career, it is less than a revelation to hear this has posed many challenges for Bellucci, not merely in transitioning from a model for some of the largest couture brands like Dolce & Gabbana. Born in 1964, the actress and fashion model claimed her first biggest on-screen appearance in French director Gilles Mimouni’s The Apartment in 1996, going on to secure a later BAFTA Award for ‘Best Film Not in the English Language’.
Seemingly parallel to the later role in which she denotes as bracingly challenging, the film narrates a story of a former lover, obsessed with meeting Bellucci’s character again. But yet, it was not the stint in this dark drama that would offer her career’s most difficult starring, and rather this would fall under the hands of Italian screenwriter, Giuseppe Tornatore.
First acclaimed for Cinema Paradiso in 1988, Tornatore was selective with his casting of the movie, Malena, in which a young Giuseppe Sulfaro – of Father of Mercy and A Hero in Rome – would play a 12-year-old boy taken by the introduction of a new beauty in his small-minded Sicilian town, during World War II.
Starring alongside the adolescent actor, Bellucci’s character, the coming-of-age film’s namesake, Malena Scordia, was fated to abandon her teaching job after her husband was asked to join the British army. And as is typical in the rural 1940s village, Malena begins to endure rumours of her nature as she begins her residence, falling under the criticism of suspicious wives and envious males.
But within the tender nature of the film’s central plot, the young boy, Renato, begins to pursue the mysterious woman by following her and discovering the depths of male puberty in tandem. Questioning adolescence, fantasy, and the weaponisation of beauty, Tornatore distributes minimal lines of speech to Bellucci, leaving her role more to the physical expression of her figure and bodily language.
Speaking in an interview with James Mottram for the BBC, Mellucci explains that even despite her previous roles in thriller features and this time starring alongside a child figuratively infatuated with her, it was, in fact, “the idea of the film” that posed “a challenge. I learned how a body can speak”. Contributed to by her prior experience in modelling, Bellucci believes that a real star can thrive without words.
She concludes by noting that despite appearance, beauty is not a talent but a confidence one carries. “I’m comfortable with myself, but not because I’m beautiful”, she says; an attribute mastered over her two-decade cinematic tapestry. Bellucci’s undeniable confidence may be superficially linked to her beauty, but in truth, it is something she has honed through dedication to her craft.
