Director: Guiseppe Tornatore
Starring: Antonielli Attli, Enzo Cannavale, Isa Danieli, Leo Gullotta, Marco Leonardi, upella Maggio, Agnese Nano, Leopoldo Trieste, Salvatore Cascio, Jacques Perrin, Philippe Noiret
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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
Reader comments about Cinema Paradiso
Sara (Email address withheld) writes:
I never watched a movie as such. It's amazing at how it can play with your emotions. All the emotions in the 'spectrum' are evoked, from happiness to melancholy
Ellie (Email address withheld) writes:
Brilliant! One of the all-time great film experiences.
Emma (Email address withheld) writes:
This film never fails to make me sob like a big wuss even though I know 'the kissing scene'is coming every time!
alan granville (alan@granville2230.fsnet.co.uk) writes:
cynics really shouldn't be allowed to watch such a wonderful film. you have to watch it with your heart not your head,give yourself to it. i'm in the business so i know how films are made but everytime i watch it i completly surrender to the best film i've ever seen
Danzig (Email address withheld) writes:
The ending reveals that the film is neither romantic nor emotionally manipulative, and that it is a very cynical work.
Toto loses Alfredo, the only woman that he loves, the joy of watching movies, film watching as a communal event, contact with most of his friends, and even his immediate family. He barely recognizes his nephews and nieces, and appears to sleep with a different woman each time. It's possible that many of award-winning films are feel-good pictures that people gush over and say how wonderful and amazing they are, and for all that he merely produces what critics want. The rest of the time, it's possible that he makes commercial flicks to keep the rest of the audience entertained.
That's why the film is entitled _Cinema Paradiso_. It's like Adam and Eve's paradise, a place now left to myth and where human beings can never return. The posters of porn is just the beginning. Together with the parking lot and the cineplex, we'll have escapist films interspersed with feel-good award winners.
For all that, most members of the audience still go gushy for what is obviously a very cynical work. It's like listeners who think that the Police's _Every Breath You Take_ is about love or that Springsteen's _Born in the U.S.A_ is a patriotic song.
Frank (tuan@tuan1.freeserve.co.uk) writes:
This film is a shocking waste of Philippe Noiret's talent as a subtle performer of off-beat roles (remeber "Coup de Torchon"?). Alfredo seems to have no antecedents and no interests, apart from Toto and his cinema. Like all the perfomers, he is allotted a one-dimensional role. Toto is so cloying he make me want to vomit. As Salvatore, he later makes a good pairing with the insipid Erena. The device of the projectionist's box giving on to the town square, the nest from which Alfredo has a bird's eye view of the internal and external worlds of Giancarlo (a sort of monarch of all he surveys) is brilliant, but the director does not develop the idea. In fact, the film has little development at all, neither has its score.
However, the photography is marvelous, and the studies of the town's architecture are superb. Overall, it is a film worth watching as its many faults give one so much to think about.
prettylady (Email address withheld) writes:
this is the first Italian movie I have ever seen..And I fell in love with it!
Andy (warholes@hotmail.com) writes:
I watched Cinema Paradiso as a child.
What is most memorable about the film for me today is Guiseppe Tornatore's use of light, golden. As an adult, I hope the film has no sinister hidden depths. It is easy to make a new film look old, much harder to make an old film look new.
I would like to read the script.
Dean Agius (deanagius@hotmail.com) writes:
The narrative of Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 Italian gem is distinctly segmented and effortlessly coherent. Salvatore (Toto) is a successful film director in his 40s. When he learns of the death of a prominent figure from his formative years, he privately reminisces on the highs and lows of growing up in the community he left more than 30 years earlier.
Young Toto, played with delightful enigmatic naturalism by Salvatore Cascio, is pugnacious and mischievous. Raised in a small Sicilian village in the 1940s by his struggling, widowed mother he adores the cinema. He loves film more than anything in the world. He steals his mother’s milk money to get into screenings and it’s easy to sympathise. The local Cinema Paradiso is a vibrant place where the villagers gather to take in the latest screenings; a place to escape the communistic rule and laugh, whistle, grope, fall in love, breast feed, get drunk – in short, it is a place to live; not merely an extension of the community, but the heart of it.
In one beautifully photographed scene, the Paradiso, already packed, is besieged by villagers desperate to see the film of the week. As the unhappy mob file into the village square, ragged projectionist Alfredo (a wonderfully world-weary Philippe Noiret) cleverly uses a mirror to reflect the image from the cinema screen onto the wall of a house in the square. As the image is redirected, the camera slowly pans with it as it slides and slithers across the walls of the projection booth and out of the window – the movement is utterly sensual and full of life, as though the film itself is seductively slipping out to taste the night.
The first half of Paradiso is perhaps the better, focusing on the frictional friendship of young Toto and Alfredo. The projectionist is at first reluctant to allow Toto into his booth, and refuses to give the young cineaste the reels of kissing scenes that local holy man, Father Adelfio, ordered be cut before they could be screened. Precocious Toto worms his way into the booth, and under Alfredo’s wing, after a promise to help the projectionist in a test. A devastatingly cruel twist of fate sees a technically gifted Toto hired as projectionist for the Paradiso, and guided by Alfredo, the cinema continues to thrive.
Adolescent Toto (a perfectly understated Marco Leonardi) has fallen in love. The object of his affection - beautiful student Elena - does not reciprocate, so every night after working the Paradiso he waits outside her window in the hope that she will come around – Toto has lost none of his dogged determination. In the development of this romance, Tornatore uses all the devices and contrivances of a true cinematic love story – it is a technique that at once feels like a tongue in cheek pastiche, and a metaphor for Toto’s complete submersion in film. For example, upon hearing that Elena is to leave for University, Toto soliloquises: ‘When will this bloody summer end. In a film, it’d already be over. Cut, and there’s a storm.’ Without a pause, lightening strikes, and in the resultant downpour Elena unexpectedly arrives and the two passionately kiss – truly the stuff of movies.
Toto is drafted into military service. His absence and subsequent return is marked only by a virtually reclusive Alfredo. In one of the most moving scenes in this utterly moving film, the old projectionist selflessly talks Toto into leaving the small village, to move on, move away and to never “give in to nostalgia” and return.
Toto keeps this promise to Alfredo, until it is no longer necessary to do so. When he does return, thirty years later and by then a successful director, he visits the ruin of the old Paradiso – it is a moment full of emotional symbolism. The concrete lion’s mouth through which the films were once projected - a barely concealed metaphor for the power of the projected image - lies crumbled and useless on the ground. It is difficult not to feel that the words spoken to the middle-aged Toto by the old Paradiso owner are the feelings of Tornatore himself: “The world of films has become a memory”.
The Cinema Paradiso must have been a glorious place for a young Toto to indulge his love affair with movies. Those early colourful scenes provide a rather stark contrast to the slightly clinical cinema-going experience of today. If people talk, they are shushed. If a couple kiss they should expect an aptly proportioned number of tuts. And God forbid a mobile phone should ring. Perhaps it was with this in mind that Tornatore made his modern masterpiece. Whatever the reason, the result is a beautifully nostalgic, utterly heart wrenching romantic waltz. Cinema Paradiso is almost certainly the most emotionally engaging film about a love of film ever made.
ricky (Email address withheld) writes:
Cinema Paradiso captures the climate of post-World War II rural areas, in most of the world at that time. When I saw Cinema Paradiso, I was pleasantly surprised because although its setting is Italy, it might as well have been my rural hometown in the Philippines during that time, when television was not yet the dominant medium and moviewatching was the most popular -- and cheap -- entertainment available, even to poor people. People would go to movies, either as a family or as a group of friends. watching movies then was a communal experience. The movie was the "king" then in the rural areas because there was no TV, no cable, no computers, no cellphones (or even telephones), no malls. It is an era now long dead but captured for all time by Cinema Paradiso.
Alessandro (Email address withheld) writes:
"CINEMA PARADISO" by Giuseppe Tornatore, is one of the best film made... EVER. For my money, is the best, because has become my favored. I never date a woman, who i know, did not like the movie. So what, i'm a little to hard on them????? Well, go and see the movie, if you have not, and then you will , understand. Yes...it does not matter how many times, i seen the movie, when it gets to the part, where TOTO...watches..the reel that ALFREDO , had saved for him, of the cut out, of all the kisses , i get emotional...and that's ...it.. END of STORY.
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