Is this the beginning of a beautiful Hollywood career for Bellucci? Don’t bet on it. “I’m not a Hollywood actress,” she says over mint tea at Casablanca’s Riad Salam hotel. She’s in town to film “Secret Agents,” a French spy thriller in which she stars opposite her husband, French actor Vincent Cassel. “I’m not American. I’m European, and I need to express things that are part of my culture.” Her role models are Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Claudia Cardinale and Anna Magnani–the formidable actresses of the golden age of Italian cinema. But, some say, her roles have not yet allowed her to explore the same range as her predecessors. “Monica has the joie de vivre and the appeal of Sophia Loren, but she hasn’t been given the kinds of parts yet where her beauty is not in the way,” says Lambert Wilson, who plays her husband, Merovingian, in “The Matrix Reloaded.” “When she does get them, I think she will surprise everyone.” That may happen as soon as next year, when she appears as Mary Magdalene in “The Passion,” Mel Gibson’s retelling of the last days of Jesus Christ, in Latin and Aramaic. “Monica has a certain glamour, to be sure,” says Frederic Schoendoerffer, her director in “Secret Agents.” “But at the same time, she’s very natural. That’s what’s so interesting about her.”
The only child of a transport-company owner and a housewife, Bellucci was raised in Citta di Castello, a small town in Umbria. At 18, she left to study law at the University of Perugia, and earned some pocket money working part time as a fashion model. After a year, she gave up law and moved to Milan, where she joined Elite Model Management and quickly became the muse of the Italian designers Dolce & Gabbana. Francis Ford Coppola saw some pictures of Bellucci in a fashion magazine and hired her for what she calls a “tiny, tiny, tiny part” in “Dracula.” “It was magic,” she recalls, her husky voice tinged with an Italian accent. “To start with someone as important and talented as Francis Ford Coppola–beautiful.”
But Bellucci knew she wasn’t ready for her close-up yet. “I always loved acting,” she says, “but from where I came, to become an actress seemed so far and difficult.” She took it slow and easy, moving first to Rome to study her craft, then to Paris to launch what she calls “an international career.” She starred in a series of small French films, including “L’Appartement,” an erotic mystery in which she played the former love of the soon-to-be-married Cassel. Bellucci won rave reviews and Cassel’s heart: they married in 1999, and have made more than a half-dozen films together.
In 2000, Bellucci scored her first leading role in a Hollywood film, Stephen Hawkins’s “Under Suspicion,” a murder mystery set in Puerto Rico, with Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman. That led to a slew of offers to star in American films, but she turned them down, deciding then and there that she did not want to pursue a Hollywood career solely. So she returned to her native Italy to star in “Malena,” which the director of “Cinema Paradiso” had written specifically for her. In it, Bellucci plays a young and–what else? –devastatingly sexy war widow who is desired by the men in town and despised by their wives. Though she barely utters a word in the entire picture, Bellucci confidently projects Malena’s emotional roller-coaster ride from blushing bride to weary refugee. " ‘Malena’ opened so many doors for me," –Bellucci acknowledges now. Indeed, Bruce Willis suggested Bellucci to director Antoine Fuqua for “Tears of the Sun” after seeing “Malena.”
Her clout rose most significantly, however, with “Irreversible.” Bellucci and Cassel knew Noe’s work–particularly the arresting “I Stand Alone”–and approached the Argentine-born director about doing a film together. They declared Noe’s first pitch too sexually explicit. Then he came up with the rape-and-revenge idea, and Bellucci and Cassel agreed. Six weeks later they were on the set, shooting. Bellucci filmed the controversial rape scene six times, uninterrupted. “I don’t think an American actress of her importance would do it, at least not in that way,” Noe says. “Monica has a lot of guts.”
When the Cannes selection committee viewed “Irreversible” last year, two members reportedly threatened to quit if it was included in the competition lineup. Thierry Fremaux, the festival’s creative director, threatened to quit if it wasn’t. “I think it was important to show such a film,” he says. When it unspooled for the first time at Cannes’s Palais des Festivals, some audience members fainted and more than 200 people walked out–some apparently straight to the restroom to vomit. Though most critics attacked the picture as gratuitously violent and pornographic, many hailed Bellucci’s performance, calling it “searing.” " ‘Irreversible’ is a provocation," she argues in defense of the film. “Even when I see the rape scene today, I think, ‘Oh my God!’ and I know it’s just acting. This is not the kind of movie to watch while eating popcorn because you are going to throw up. But it does make you think. And sometimes it’s good to think.”
These days Bellucci barely has a moment to think herself. But after she wraps “Secret Agents,” she hopes to take a few months off to exhale and reflect, maybe start a family. “When you make movies, it’s not just an experience as an actress,” she says, in the shade of the hot Moroccan sun. “It’s an experience as a human being, and you need to experience life to know what it’s about.” For Bellucci, no doubt, it’s a dolce vita.
