“Cinema Paradiso” Review
Philippe Noriet (Left) and Salvatore Casico star in “Cinema Paradiso” as an old projectionist who teaches a young boy how to operate the cinema and invigorates the boy’s passion for film.
While I like a lot of movies, I love only a select few. When I say love, I don’t mean throwing it around like when someone asks what you think of an entertaining movie and you say “oh I loved it.” I’m talking about a deep love. The kind of love that you’d have for a significant other or a close family member. A level of affection so deep and so intense that every time you feel it it’s as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Of course, this love doesn’t just exist for people. It can be assigned to places, animals and, of course, art. When a film manages to elicit love from me, it becomes a vital part of my existence as a filmmaker and a lifelong student of cinema. Such is the case for 1988’s “Cinema Paradiso,” an Italian masterpiece which is not only one of my all-time favorite films, but an immaculate portrayal of nostalgia and how the cinema can mold us.
In modern Rome, a filmmaker named Salvatore Di Vita (Jacques Perrin) receives a distressing phone call from home, informing him that an old friend named Alfredo (Philippe Noriet) has died. After more than 30 years, Salvatore returns to his hometown of Giancaldo, Sicily for Alfredo’s funeral and reminisces about his childhood. The rest of the film, set in postwar Sicily in the 1940s and 50s, sees a young Salvatore (Salvatore Casico and Marco Leonardi), nicknamed “Toto,” fall in love with the films shown at the tiny local cinema called The Cinema Paradiso. Eventually, Toto becomes friends with Alfredo, the projectionist at the cinema, who teaches the young boy how to work the projector. Over the course of many years, Toto grows up, falls in love and experiences the many trials of childhood and early adulthood all with the cinema as a guardian angel.
I first saw the film almost a year ago in the days before I was to graduate from Northern Illinois University. In an article I wrote for my campus newspaper, The Northern Star, about the first time I went to the local cinema palace, The Egyptian Theatre, and how I fell in love with it. I went on to compare it to the theater in “Cinema Paradiso” and how much I would miss the Egyptian when I graduated. But I didn’t just write about The Egyptian Theatre during my four years of college. I also performed there as a member of the Shadowcast for “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Every May, the staff of the Egyptian would throw a party for the Shadowcast as a way of saying “thank you” for the revenue we brought them and they would play a film. Since the staff of the Egyptian knew me quite well and read my article, they asked if they could play “Cinema Paradiso” and I said yes.
What followed was two hours of pure bliss as my fellow cast members and I were entranced by this film. We felt such a range of emotions and constantly had tears in our eyes either from laughter or sadness. When it was all over, one of my friends turned to me and said “I think I just fell in love with that movie.” I think that’s the general reaction from everyone who has seen “Cinema Paradiso.” It’s a love letter to cinema that is so powerful that we also become enamored with it.
The chemistry Noriet has with both child Salvatore (Casico) and teenaged Salvatore (Marco Leonardi) is remarkable as Alfredo becomes a father figure to the young boy.
All three actors who play Salvatore are remarkable and bring you along this journey of childhood. As a young boy, Salvatore Casico brings such an innocence to this boy even though he loves to get into mischief. He’s got the bright smile and the wide-eyed curiosity that immediately captivates you and you love seeing this boy become attached to cinema and Alfredo. Then, when Toto grows into a young man, Marco Leonardi is the one who shows how Toto becomes Salvatore. He experiences heartbreak and has to decide whether he’ll stay in his hometown or go away to see the world. While both Casico and Leonardi are excellent as the youthful incarnations of Toto, it’s Jacques Perrin who brings so much emotional weight because you see how the events of his childhood have affected him. He carries himself more slowly and Perrin’s emotion is some of the finest I’ve ever seen in a film.
In the film, Toto falls in love multiple times in different ways. Primarily, his chief love is with the local cinema. While Toto is a very bright boy, he doesn’t have a deep love for school, especially since his teachers love to beat the kids just for getting a math problem wrong. He also doesn’t have any particular affinity towards his position as an altar boy at church, even falling asleep during a mass. It’s the cinema that he adores because of the escapism it provides. He watches so many films with lots of strange places, gunfights and action, but no kissing! Why? Because, whenever a new print comes to Alfredo, he has to screen it for the local priest who censors any romantic scenes. Anytime a kiss is seen, Father Adelfio rings the bell and Alfredo makes a note to cut that particular strip of film.
Through his continued snooping, Toto gets on Alfredo’s nerves to the point where Alfredo promises all of the cut kissing scenes to Toto as a gift on the condition that Toto leave him alone and that Alfredo keeps the scenes in a safe location. Eventually, Alfredo warms up to the boy and teaches him the ways of running the cinema. As time goes on Alfredo becomes far more than a friend to Toto, he becomes a father.
Since Toto’s father was killed in the war, Alfredo is the one that teaches Toto about the world, how to be a good man and the facts of love. The relationship is further strengthened when a film reel catches fire and engulfs the cinema. While Toto manages to save Alfredo from the flames, a film reel blows up in Alfredo’s face and blinds him. Thus, it is up to Toto to not only care for Alfredo with Anna, Alfredo’s wife, but to keep the projectors running when the cinema is rebuilt, bigger and better than ever.
As Alfredo, Philippe Noriet brings so much to this role as Toto’s paternal figure. He sees the brightness in Toto and wants it to burn by any means necessary. The relationship he and Toto have through the years is endlessly fascinating. Their interactions early on are incredibly childish with Toto demanding to see the films and Alfredo making faces at him to go away. However, Alfredo eventually finds solace in the young boy as someone who can wash away the lonely feelings he gets in the projection booth.
One scene in particular cements their friendship when Alfredo is taking the same school equivalency exam as a young Toto. While starting off strong, Alfredo starts to have trouble and begs Toto for help. In exchange for admittance to the projection booth, Toto helps him and a friendship is born. While Alfredo is the first to admit that he’s not that smart, he has more wisdom than I think he gives himself credit for which he eventually passes on to his protégé.
The film addresses growth and how a young Toto becomes the man he’s meant to be. This includes a summer romance with Elena (Agnese Nano) who shows him that there’s more to life than just the cinema, but not much else.
The final love that Toto develops in the film isn’t the artistic kind he feels for the cinema nor the platonic kind he feels for Alfredo. When he’s a teenager in high school, Toto meets a beautiful girl named Elena (Agnese Nano) and seeks to woo her despite her being from a rich family. Eventually, it works and they develop a powerful summer romance that is cut short when Elena’s family moves away with Toto unable to see her again.
All of these loves shape Toto into the man he’ll become and lead to him to leave his hometown for good on the instructions of Alfredo. To become truly great, Alfredo tells Toto to forget about everything and everyone in Giancaldo and to never write or visit. Toto does just that. Upon returning for Alfredo’s burial, Salvatore sees how this quaint small town where beautiful buildings and rubble coexisted has changed. The people he grew up with have aged, the town square has billboards, there are cars everywhere and the beloved Cinema Paradiso is a ruin, closing six years ago because “nobody came anymore.” After Alfredo’s funeral, Salvatore and the rest of the town watch the theater they loved so much be blown up to make way for a parking lot. It’s the end of an era where, to see dreams while you were awake, all you had to do was walk into the town square.
If you were to ask me what many of my favorite films have in common, it’s that they were personal for the filmmaker. It’s why I love “Almost Famous,” “American Graffiti,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Do The Right Thing” and “The Fabelmans.” The more invested the filmmaker is in his story, the better off the film will be and that’s the case with director Giuseppe Tornatore. Not only did Tornatore base much of the film on his own childhood experiences, but he shot significant parts of the film in his hometown of Bagheria, Sicily.
What draws me to this film is how romantic it is and not just because of its content. The look of the film is so immaculate with beautiful colors and imagery. Giuseppe Tornatore and cinematographer Blasco Giurato use the camera to essentially make living paintings. So many individual frames of this film could be hung in an art gallery. While so much of the dialogue from Tornatore’s screenplay is fantastic, he also knows how to tell a story visually. If you were to put the film on mute, you would still be able to decipher what is occurring.
However, I would not advise doing that because then you would miss out on one of Ennio Morricone’s finest scores of all time, which is saying a tremendous lot. The Italian legend of film music, Morricone made over 400 scores for both the big and small screen until his 2020 death. While most people know his scores for films like “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” “The Untouchables,” “The Thing” and “The Hateful Eight” (the lattermost won him an Academy Award in 2015), it would be a mistake to assume that he only wrote badass, triumphant music for action pictures. The score that he crafted for “Cinema Paradiso” is romantic and flowing. Collaborating with him was his son Andrea who was instrumental in the composition of the film’s love theme. If you were to make a list of the finest music made for film, “Cinema Paradiso” certainly deserves consideration.
Like the score, the film itself ranges in tone from having its dramatic scenes to moments of comedic joy. This is especially apparent in how the entire town comes to the cinema and interacts with each other. There’s one asshole who spits on people, there’s some people who just want to make out in the back, there’s a couple that find love in the cinema, there’s a bunch of boys whose minds are blown by the beautiful starlets on the big screen, there’s a crazy man who proclaims that the entire town square belongs to him. Everyone in this cinema has their own story but they all choose to put it on hold and engage in the ritualistic experience of going to the movies.
The film’s depiction of childhood is unmistakably authentic and captures the innocent love for film that most of us experienced as children.
It’s not the town either, the titular movie house is a character in its own right. As Toto grows up, we see the theater evolve from a place of repression, where any kissing is cut from a film, to a place of liberation when it is rebuilt after the fire that claims Alfredo’s sight. I especially love when, in the new Cinema Paradiso, the entire crowd shrieks with joy when they see their first kissing scene ever. They are so happy at the sight of a simple kiss and it’s made very humorous when the priest says “I won’t watch pornography” as he storms out. Just wait until he sees “Deep Throat.”
However, the theater eventually dies. Tornatore initially saw “Cinema Paradiso” as a farewell to the kinds of theaters he loved growing up. So the film naturally ends with the aforementioned destruction. Most other films would have the wealthy Salvatore purchase the theater and fix it, giving new life to his childhood home, but that’s not what Tornatore was going for. Instead, he chooses to end the film on a very bittersweet note with Alfredo gone and the Cinema Paradiso with him. However, as everyone watches the destruction, you see just how many lives Alfredo, Salvatore and the cinema affected.
On top of that, Alfredo still has one last gift to give to Salvatore which results in one of the greatest endings in film history. While I cry throughout the whole film, mostly because of how beautiful it is, the ending is what makes me bawl like mad. After talking to Alfredo’s widow about how proud Alfredo was of his journey as a filmmaker, Salvatore is given one last gift: a film reel and the stool which Salvatore used to stand on to change the reels of the projector. Once Salvatore is back in Rome, he has the reel screened for him and he sees Alfredo’s last gift.
As the film plays, we see that every scene of kissing that Alfredo cut, the ones he promised to Toto, have all been spliced together in a daring display of passion. As Salvatore starts to cry, I have no choice but to join him because of how well this ending works. It’s the gift that Alfredo promised fully realized and it also shows that Alfredo wasn’t just a lowly projectionist, he made a film of his own. It also deeply impacts Salvatore. Not just for the reasons I just gave, but because it’s a reminder that, despite all of the artistic success he’s had as a filmmaker, he still hasn’t found love. Yet, there’s the chance he may one day find it.
I know most of you reading this don’t regularly watch films with subtitles but please let this be an exception. It is truly worth it.
Every time I watch “Cinema Paradiso,” it’s like magic. It’s a film that I have fallen in love with over and over again and that still surprises me despite how many times I’ve viewed it. However, if you are wondering which version to check out, the original cut or the director’s cut, I would have to recommend the original. Not that I hate the director’s cut. It has several great scenes added to the film, including a greater emphasis on Salvatore and Elena’s relationship. However, since it’s almost an hour longer than the original cut, it does slow the film down. In truth, the theatrical cut is better but I’m glad this other version does exist since I’m such a fan of the film.
At the 1990 Academy Awards, “Cinema Paradiso” won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film but I still think it got robbed. If the Academy cared as much about foreign cinema back then as it does today, I’m convinced that “Cinema Paradiso” would have been nominated that year for Best Picture. With the exception of “Do The Right Thing,” “Cinema Paradiso” was better than any American film nominated for the top prize that year. Better than “Glory,” better than “Dead Poets Society,” better than “Field of Dreams.” You heard me right. This film is better than the baseball film that makes every grown man, including myself, cry. It certainly deserved a Best Picture nomination more than “Driving Miss Daisy,” which won the Oscar. However, my point with this isn’t to complain, even though I’m right. It’s to convince you of how good “Cinema Paradiso” truly is.
When I think of cinema that invigorates me, that stirs my passion for the theater, that reminds me why I love movies in the first place, this is it.
