Malena, the dazzling beauty who has ravished minds with her charm, became the source of Renato’s dreams and the inspiration for his sexual imagination. He in turn became a secret shadow behind her, spying on her every move out of love. Italian actress Monica Bellucci, through the movie Malena, went from local to global, as she was able to embody two contradictory styles in one woman.

In the first half of the movie, Malena embodies (Penelope) type, the loyal wife of extraordinary beauty who awaits her hero husband (Odyssey-Nino) until he returns from the war, she repels everyone in loyalty to her husband. The movie was shot in Sicily. Malena was waiting her husband to return, he is fighting in North Africa. The sea may or may not bring her husband, and North Africa may or may not bring victory. Malena’s husband died in the war, and Penelope began to change her old lifestyle and gradually move to a new life, cutting her long black hair (which is associated with her husband’s waiting period), then dyeing her hair red, the color of (love, sex and excitement). She began to wear sexy clothes, and a red lipstick to appeal to men, holding her cigarette as a masculine symbol that defied men, representing a social change and a paradigm shift in the nature of life.

It is true that the character of Malena dominates most of the course of the movie, but the character of the boy Renato represents the axis of transgression in the culture of society. He lives in a tyrannical society that can’t reveal beauty or even sympathize with it, or even reveal its secrets. So, he formed a psychological knot of conflict between beauty and tyranny that deepened during the war period, here Renato talks to Malena for the first time in his life, getting rid of his previous complex, to begin a love affair with a girl of his generation. The tyrannical society that is hostile to beauty begets psychologically and emotionally deformed children. The value of beauty must be raised, so that Renato and all his generation can live a healthy, free and non-tyrannical life.

Elderly Renato tells at the end of the movie that he met many women, and he often hugged them and they asked him not to forget them, but he forgot all of them, except for Malena, who is the only one who cannot be forgotten as long as he lived.