CINEMA PARADISO

“Life isn't like in the movies, Toto. Life isn’t beautiful.”

Cinema Paradiso is a film of acquired taste. Few people these days, Americans especially, will watch films in languages unfamiliar to them. Cinema Paradiso is such a film. All I can say for these people is that they are missing out on a gem of a film. Though it is in Italian (dubbed in English), it connects with any true lover of film, familiar with any language, because of its sincerity.

Director Giuseppe Tornatore claims his film is the loose version of his childhood, and the relationship he shared with the local cinema projectionist. This is Tornatore’s love story, his homage to the people and ideas that molded his life at a young age, and allowed him to do the one thing he loved more than anything else as a living: create films.

Cinema Paradiso starts out with a phone call. An elderly mother named Maria calls the home of her son Salvatore, whom the film is based around through multiple time periods (as a child, a teenager, and a grown man), who left his Sicilian home thirty years before. She can not reach him, instead being able to communicate with him through his girlfriend. The girlfriend mutters that she called for him, and that a man named Alfredo has died. Alfredo, we find out, is the projectionist.

About two hours out of the 135-minute running time of the film is a flashback. It is Salvatore’s story told over the course of fifteen years, from him starting school and his first days in the projecting room, to him leaving Sicily for good.

Tornatore sprinkles his film with the elements that makes movies great. It is shot very similarly to how a movie would be shot when the film takes place, in the 1940s and 1950s. It is sentimental, but never sappy; funny, but never corny, and poignant, but never melodramatic. There is an innocence in seeing a young Salvatore look at the pieces of film that Alfredo has cut, the shots that the town priest has forbidden due to kissing. There is an unfakeable glee in Salvatore Cascio’s (the actor who plays Salvatore as a child) as he sees what no one else in the village, grown men even, has ever seen.

As the film progresses, Salvatore matures. He has taken over the projector’s seat that was once occupied by Alfredo, and while his love for film hasn’t dulled, the world seemingly has. Tornatore paints a beautiful, if slightly tragic, image of a world that seems to be at its greatest and most exuberant point when Salvatore can experience the movies. While the cinematography gets progressively darker in the outside world, the movies stay a constant. They always welcome him and offer him the ability to be transported to other worlds.

At the end of Cinema Paradiso, one feels bittersweet. It ends the way all good stories should, with the audience content with the beautiful, touching story they have just been consumed in, but sad to leave the characters they have grown to know. More than thirty years have gone by in a flash of two hours. A grown Salvatore has come to term with the death of the most influential man of his life. Above all other reasons, this film was made because of Giuseppe Tornatore’s wanting to tell his story. It ends on the most beautiful note of the film’s entire length, a montage of the kissing scenes he was forbidden as a child to see, but because of the projectionist did nonetheless. I don’t think there could have been a better way for Tornatore to finish his confession of love to cinema than this sequence.

A+