Monica Bellucci

Declaring who the most beautiful woman is in films today seems like just the pointless exercise this blog was made for. I have lots of favorites in this regard, and I could change my mind every five minutes, but putting the name Monica Bellucci out there is a pretty safe bet. Would anyone mount a vigorous opposition?

Over the past few days I've caught up on some of her films that I haven't seen: Like a Fish Out of Water, Under Suspicion, Tears of the Sun, Shoot 'Em Up, How Much Do You Love Me? and The Brothers Grimm. Of course I'd earlier seen her work in Dracula, Malena, Irreversible and two Matrix pictures.

Bellucci was a model who has made a fairly seamless transition to actress. A woman of such beauty is going to be typecast, though, and she almost always plays variations on the madonna/whore character, often displaying both in the same role at the same time. This is certainly true in Shoot 'Em Up, where she plays a prostitute who is lactating, and thus is enlisted by a mysterious hero to care for an orphaned baby. She also plays a prostitute in Bertrand Blier's How Much Do You Love Me?, a strange and surreal comedy about a meek man who wins the lottery and pays Bellucci to be his girlfriend. What works for her in this film is that it seems entirely reasonable for a man to pay her 100,000 Euros (a month!) to do this, because she is so ethereally beautiful.

Bellucci is beautiful, yes, in a classic way. She seems to have stepped down from a renaissance painting. She has a regal quality that demands she play parts that are costumed in finery, whether it is an evening gown or a hooker's fur coat and leather boots. One cannot picture her wearing a t-shirt and sweats, and thus far I haven't seen her in a role that would require that. In Under Suspicion she plays the much younger wife of powerful attorney Gene Hackman, and in her first appearance in that film she is seen from behind, her cello-shaped form squeezing into a gown. In Like a Fish Out of Water, a quirky yet ultimately reductive French crime thriller about thieves trying to steal an exotic tropical fish, she is a hotel manager on the French Riviera who stalks across the screen like a panther, imperious and predatory, with men willing to do anything just to be breathe the same air as she does. It's easy to empathize.

Bellucci, perhaps because she was a model and wants to be taken seriously, has done some rather brave things on screen. Irreversible is a film I saw once and need never seen again. It is remarkable in a few respects: it is told in reverse, and contains two of the most brutal scenes you are likely to see in a film. In one, a man is savagely beaten, his face caved in by a fire extinguisher. In another, Bellucci is savagely raped in a single, ten-minute or so take that leaves little to the imagination. Another brave role, and perhaps her best performance that I've seen, is in Malena. She plays a widowed Italian woman who is misjudged by her fellow townspeople as a woman of low morals and is beaten and humiliated.

Bellucci's face can also be used for evil, and it's not surprising that she's played Dracula's bride or an evil queen, as she did in The Brothers Grimm for Terry Gilliam. But then again she is right at home playing a doctor in the African jungle in Tears of the Sun. So often we see gorgeous women playing scientists of one sort or another (perhaps the height of this inanity is Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist in a James Bond picture) but Bellucci completely sells the idea that she can be a surgeon tending to the poor in Tears. Again, it's the madonna factor.

Tears of the Sun is probably her largest role in an English-language film, and this is the one aspect of her that is most lacking--she speaks English as if she were speaking it phonetically. I've heard her speak English naturally, particularly on DVD extras, and it sounds much smoother, but in her performances it has a more stylized hollowness to it. But with a woman who looks like that, who cares how thick her accent is?