Malena has been on my watch list for the longest time, and I finally got around to watching it recently. Within minutes, I knew I had to write about it. Not as a typical review, but as an exploration of women’s relationship with the male gaze and female jealousy, both seen through the haunting figure of Malena.

The opening scene sets the tone for everything that follows. Teenage boys are gathered across the street from her home, restless, waiting for her to step outside. And when she finally does, the world stands still.

Her beauty is undeniable, magnetic, almost unreal. We watch her through the eyes of these boys, mainly Renato, whose fascination with her defines the story. From the start, Malena depicts how the female body is consumed through the eyes of men.

Renato follows her, spies on her through windows, fantasizes about her. And here’s the brilliant cruelty of the film: we barely hear Malena speak. We don’t know her thoughts, her emotions, or her fears. She exists in silence. Always seen, never truly known. As an audience, we too become voyeurs, uninvited yet unable to look away.

After finishing the movie, I couldn’t stop thinking about her silence. That absence of voice is the point. It’s what makes the movie so powerful  and so painfully real.

Her silence isn’t just personal; it becomes the town’s obsession. Because when a woman doesn’t explain herself, people will write her story for her. And that’s exactly what happens in Malena.

In this small Sicilian town, everyone is captivated by her. Men — married, old, young — want her, fantasize about her, project their desires onto her. They create stories, spin rumors, rewrite her life through their fantasies.

And then there are the women. The jealous ones. The cruel ones. The ones who hate her not for what she’s done, but for what she is. They resent her beauty because it reminds them of their own lack of the power they don’t have, the attention they’ll never receive.

The result is a town intoxicated by one woman’s existence. The men lust and the women loathe. And Malena, caught between both, becomes a symbol of everything fragile and vicious about human nature.

There’s a scene that still makes me flinch. The public beating and shaming of Malena. I had to pause and skip parts of it. It’s one of those scenes that stays with you, not because of shock value, but because of what it reveals: how far people will go when driven by envy and repression. The horror of seeing a woman stripped, humiliated, and degraded in front of a crowd. It’s not just a movie scene. It’s history. It’s reality. It’s every time beauty becomes a threat.

Beauty can be both a gift and a burden. It opens doors but also isolates you. For Malena, her beauty became her prison. It separated her from the world, making her both worshipped and despised.

As the film progresses, her beauty, once her silent power becomes her downfall. The same face that enchanted the town becomes the reason she’s cast out of it. The movie critiques not just sexism, but the way envy and desire coexist in the same glance. Malena was seen, but never known.

I can’t talk about Malena without diving into the horror of the male gaze. We watch the entire movie through it and that in itself is deeply uncomfortable. From the first scene, we’re forced to look at her the way men do.

There were moments when I caught myself watching her like they did and it disgusted me. I paused the movie several times just to sit with that realization. The female gaze doesn’t really exist. We as women, are programmed from childhood to perform for the male gaze. From the way we dress, how we walk, how we smile is shaped by this invisible audience. And it fucking sickens me.

In the movie, the men want to own her beauty. They don’t care about her pain or loneliness; she’s an object to be had, a prize to be won. Never a person. Never someone with a heartbeat and a soul.

After the credits rolled, I sat for a long time thinking about how impossible it feels to escape the male gaze. Women are spectacles: constantly watched, constantly judged. And, it’s so internalized that even we start to see ourselves through it.

For the past few months, I’ve been living in India and I feel this every single day. Here, I don’t dress to express myself; I dress to avoid being looked at. My goal when I leave the house isn’t to feel beautiful. It’s to not be stared at, followed, or made uncomfortable.

India is a male-gaze-centric society. Things have progressed in some ways, but more or less they remain the same. Men still feel entitled to comment on women’s bodies, to claim ownership of our existence, the same way the men in Malena did. That silent entitlement is what makes the male gaze so insidious, it hides in everyday interactions, in how women learn to shrink, cover, and disappear.

The male gaze isn’t just cinematic. It’s everyday life. It’s the little things women do to be acceptable, desirable, and safe. It’s the checklist we grow up learning:

Be sexy, but not too much.
Be kind, but not naive.
Be confident, but never intimidating.
Be smart, but not smarter than your man.
Have curves, but not a belly.
Show skin, but not too much of it.

Women are always performing even when they don’t realize it. And I keep asking myself: why do we always have to perform? Why can’t we just exist?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized: maybe the female gaze doesn’t exist at all. Maybe it’s just women trying to reclaim something that was never really ours to begin with.

There’s a quote by John Berger in Ways of Seeing that captures it perfectly:

“A woman must continually watch herself… Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at… Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

And that, to me, is Malena.
A woman who is only ever seen.
A woman whose silence echoes louder than any words.
A woman whose beauty became both her weapon and her wound.

xo

Yachna

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I’d love to know what you think. Have you watched Malena? Did it hit you the same way? Do you ever think about how the male gaze quietly shapes the way we exist even when we think we’re being ourselves? Comment your thoughts below.