Monica Bellucci's weird and wonderful movie career
Traffic-stopper extraordinaire; modern-day Sophia Loren; Bond girl in waiting… A guide to best - and strangest - films of Monica Bellucci
When you see her in a creamy white robe, standing in a shallow limestone pool on the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea, she looks like she’s walking on water. Monica Bellucci’s first appearance in The Wonders, the new film from Alice Rohrwacher, might be the slyest use of the Italian actress to date. She plays Milly Catena, the hostess of Countryside Wonders, a gloriously tacky travel-cum-talent show on Italian TV.
Milly’s main qualification for the job seems to be her obvious sex appeal. But to 12-year-old country girl Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), who spies Milly on set during a trip to the beach with her father and sisters, she’s an otherworldly figure – a silvery goddess who might have stepped out of a Roman fresco, or a film by Fellini.
Though it’s a supporting role, the 50-year-old actress’s aura shines through every frame of The Wonders. To young Gelsomina, Milly is an ideal of Italian womanhood – worlds apart from, yet also somehow intimately connected to, her own family’s hardscrabble life keeping bees on the swelling Umbrian hillsides. It’s a role that makes you reflect on Bellucci’s own 25-year acting career: like Milly, she seems to have beamed down to the drab present from another era, where the colours are brighter and emotions more keenly felt.
Choosing Bellucci’s best roles isn’t easy. It means working out which directors have been able to anchor that supernatural, out-of-time vivaciousness to something real – in other words, to give her something else to do besides stop traffic. Many, of course, have fallen over themselves to try: the latest being Sam Mendes, who has cast Bellucci as the mysterious Lucia Sciarra in the forthcoming James Bond movie Spectre. Here, starting with her greatest role to date, are the ones who best succeeded.
