An overripe slice of arthouse T&A with only the shallowest veneer of class, Giuseppe Tornatore's Malèna approximates European cinema as it might exist in the popular imagination; for Seinfeld fans, it's this year's Rochelle, Rochelle ("one woman's erotic journey from Milan to Minsk"). Representing the lustful eyes of a Sicilian boy during WWII, Tornatore's camera peeks, ogles, and stares at the voluptuous dimensions of Monica Bellucci, an absurdly beautiful widow whose body alone causes talk of scandal to ripple through a gossipy town. Overcome with desire, the men resent her for being unattainable, while the women resent all the tongue-wagging in her direction; without a shred of evidence one way or the other, both parties agree she's a whore. Only Giuseppe Sulfaro, an adolescent who follows nearly her every waking moment, knows the dark and mysterious Bellucci is really a virtuous woman, but he's too consumed by erection management to take action on her behalf. Underneath a lot of standard coming-of-age fare, Malèna condemns the dangerous, hypocritical group-think that led Italians to embrace fascism at the beginning of the war and cheer their Allied conquerors at the end of it. At different points in time, both Bellucci and the townspeople are guilty of sleeping with the enemy—one literally, the other figuratively—but in the film's most powerful scene, only she's punished for it. Her story makes for a potentially forceful political metaphor, but Tornatore, the director of such exuberantly middlebrow fare as Cinema Paradiso and The Legend Of 1900, is not exactly Vittorio De Sica or Costa-Gavras. Like Spielberg at his worst, Tornatore is helplessly addicted to creating moments of "movie magic," which he does by shoveling sentimentality into a bottomless pit of nostalgia. It's doubtful that anyone will come away from Malèna reeling from its anti-fascist statements, because the director's heart lies in the more banal story of a sex-crazed adolescent and the hot babe who inched him closer to manhood. To that end, Fellini accomplished more in a few raunchy scenes in Amarcord than Tornatore does in an entire feature film.