Showing in its original version rather than the longer "director's" cut
(widely held to be a more balanced and complex film), the tenth
anniversary re-release of this 1989 winner of the Palme D'Or at Cannes, and
the Best Foreign Language Film at both the Oscars and the Golden Globes,
offers an opportunity to reassess a film that was panned by critics on its
release, but proved something of a hit with the public.
The storyline aspires to myth, but finds itself hovering between romance
and melodrama, as we follow a middle-aged Salvatore into his memories of
childhood, when he was known as Toto. He has received a message from his
mother telling him that someone called Alfredo has died, and that the
funeral is tomorrow. Salvatore thinks back to his childhood in the
Sicilian village of Giancaldo, where he is an altarboy to the priest, also
the local film censor. Toto, whose father died on the Russian front, finds
a surrogate father in Alfredo, the curmudgeonly projectionist at the local
Cinema Paradiso. Toto, obsessed by films, persuades Alfredo to teach him
to be a projectionist. One evening, a reel of film catches fire in the
projector, and Alfredo is blinded. Toto becomes chief projectionist in the
rebuilt cinema, a post he occupies until he goes to the mainland to do his
military service. In the months before he goes away, he has an abortive
love affair with Elena, the beautiful daughter of the local banker. Upon
his return, he cannot find her, and returns to Rome to begin his career in
film, not returning to Giancaldo until Alfredo's funeral.
In many ways, it is easy to see why Cinema Paradiso received such a
critical savaging: it is unashamedly romantic and emotionally
manipulative; the characters, while largely amusing and engaging, are
hardly complex; the setting, a lovingly-drawn Sicilian village, is replete
with every cliché imaginable; and the plot often lumberingly symbolic.
These flaws were given a thorough airing at the time of release, but why
is it still, even in this version, a viable piece of cinema?
The film operates in three periods: Toto's childhood, adolescence and
middle age. Each is marked by a different quality to the memories, and the
nostalgia they invoke. Toto's childhood is conjured with a small arena of
familiar haunts and faces. Much is made of Toto's emotional wisdom, and
though this makes him seem cutely precocious at times, it allows the
delight to be tempered by hints of melancholy. Once we pass into Toto's
adolescence and passage into manhood, the tenor of the scenes, while not
losing playfulness and warmth, becomes a little less open, the public
scenes more anonymous, the projection booth, a surrogate womb for so many
years, no longer a world in itself. The scenes from which his memories are
launched are marked by the disillusionment of middle age, and the safety
of nostalgia.
The redemptive role played by the movies (and it is the experience of the
"movies" that the film is largely concerned with) is emphasised again and
again. From the outset, the similarity between church and cinema is shown
by following a shot of motes of dust dancing in a shaft of light in church
with a shot of the shaft of light emerging from the projection booth in
the Cinema Paradiso. Both serve as a focus for, and serve the spiritual
needs of the community. Yet it is the cinema that seems a more loving and
complete microcosm of the world - all life is here, and so on. During the
course of the film, the cinema plays host to both the hoi polloi and the
self-proclaimed local bigwigs, to a nursing mother and a couple having
sex, pubescent youths masturbating along to Brigitte Bardot in And God
Created Woman, and a prostitute. Finally, when Salvatore returns to the
predictably derelict cinema after Alfredo's funeral, posters for porno
films litter the ramshackle interior. The point that Tornatore is making
is obvious, but no less passionate for that.
Reviewed by Sameer Padania
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