Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Writer: Giuseppe Tornatore, Vanna Paoli
Starring: Marco Leonardi, Salvatore Cascio, Jacques Perrin, Philippe Noiret, Leopoldo Trieste
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 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 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.
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