Cinema Paradiso

Rating

Director
Giuseppe Tornatore
Screenplay
Giueseppe Tornatore, Vanna Paoli
Length
155 min.
Starring
Salvatore Cascio, Marco Leonardi, Jacques Perrin, Philippe Noiret, Antonella Attili, Pupella Maggio, Agnese Nano, Leopoldo Trieste, Enzo Cannavale
MPAA Rating
R for some sexuality

Review
A loving tribute to the history of movies and screen romance, Cinema Paradiso is a lengthy, but rewarding cinematic experience.

An impoverished child finds solace at the movie theater where an experienced projectionist struggles with allowing the boy to partake in the experience, while trying to keep him out of trouble at the same time. The kid is smarter than he looks and manages to sneak various strips of film cut from movies by an overzealous local priest. As he grows up, and after a tragic fire at the Cinema Paradiso theater, he becomes the projectionist at the rebuilt theater, letting his life slip away from him as he sits in the booth each night.

His mentor Alfredo (Philippe Noiret) doesn’t want him to waste his life and encourages him after the girl he loves abandons him to seek out new successes in life in Rome, far away from the small town that threatens to suffocate him. The film opens with him already in his middle age as he gets word that Alfredo has passed away, the memories of his life flood back to him and form the largest bulk of the film.

The three actors who portray young Salvatore Di Vita (Salvatore Cascio, Marco Leonardi and Jacques Perrin) range in talent from benign (teenager Leonardi) to cute but vacant (child Cascio) to experienced (elder Perrin). Only Perrin’s segments feel real and emotional. Leonardi tries far too hard and ends up coming off slightly surreal while Cascio plays all the right child actor cards without generating a level of depth desired. Noiret is a strong central force, his bedraggled appearance and associated performance carrying much of the film. A colorful array of supporting characters are drawn too thin when you first meet them, but when they are re-introduced late in the film after several decades, you realize just how much you missed them.

The lovely score by master composer Ennio Morricone frequently adds emotional resonance to the film, though some of the more hopeful strains playing over darker segments is a bit disconcerting. Still, it’s a recognizable work that plays in your mind long after the film has wrapped with only a handful of 1980’s style arrangements as a minute distraction.

It’s a movie that begs to be viewed as a love letter to cinema, lovingly recreating a timeline of American and Italian films that conjures up images of some of the most and least accomplished available. While there are several noted names mentioned, famed Italian actress Alida Valli gets perhaps the lengthiest title card, testament to her prominence in Italian cinema of the film’s predominant period.

When the film shifts to the love interest story between Leonardi and Agnese Nano’s Elena, it begins dragging a bit and we’re remiss when the cinematic history almost vanishes in the film’s final fifth. Yet, there’s a grievous lament in that section suggesting cinema as both the characters and the director (Giuseppe Tornatore) knew it.

To him and them, television and home video have diluted some of that power, but not all of it. Some characters fondly view Salvatore’s cinematic efforts, even if only on the small screen and there’s reference to the lack of attendance at Nuovo Cinema Paradiso; however, there’s the suggestion that life and filmmaking as an art can progress once we learn to allow the past to be what it is, an informative narrative for the future.
Review Written
November 6, 2011