Cinema Paradiso

For me, watching Cinema Paradiso  is like remembering a time and place that are very different from what I actually experienced, but with all the essential feelings intact.

I think the film ends up being a personal experience for many people, because director Giuseppe Tornatore shares those emotional memories, which stick with us long after the details of what actually happened have faded away.

I have a collection of hundreds of movies, many of them universally recognized “masterpieces”; but not one of them is quite like “Cinema Paradiso”.  It touches me every time I watch it, whether the theatrical release, or the considerably longer “director’s cut”, which I prefer.

Tornatore duplicates so precisely the feeling of a childhood memory, I hardly notice that’s what he is doing: only on reflection does it occur to me that the village square seems huge to young Toto, and almost tiny to Salvatore, when he returns to watch the demolition of the cinema. Likewise, the inside of the theater is cavernous to young Toto, and the lion’s-mouth projector opening is large and imposing. Both shrink noticeably when Salvatore takes his final look around the empty auditorium, and squats down to almost touch the small, cobweb-covered lion on the floor.

Colors are brighter, focus a little softer, relationships simpler and more direct to the child than when the man returns home to bury his beloved mentor. That time-perfected quality of the memories may be the most realistic aspect of the film.

The film is a kind of catalyst for my own memories, which are probably as inaccurate as Salvatore’s, but carry the same emotional impact.

My Giancaldo was a small city in Berkshire county, Massachusetts in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. (It was adamantly referred to as a “city”, on pain of ostracism, because we had reached the magic population number. Kind of reminiscent of that Hugh Grant movie about the “hill” and the “mountain” .) The whole town didn’t flock to the movie theaters, (we had two on Main street) but every kid did on Saturday morning, much to the relief of all our mothers. The Paramount was the more ornate of the two: it had been a vaudeville venue before our time, and had a fancy proscenium, plush seats, highly decorated ceiling, and gold-painted plaster flourishes everywhere. There was a balcony, from which that guy (every theater had one, including Toto’s) dropped all manner of disgusting things on the unwary seated below.

The utter chaos before the movie and the cheering joy when it started were common to my childhood and Toto’s, along with the eruptions of outrage should the film break, or some other technical difficulty ensue.

Sometime after 2006, my wife gave me a gift. It was the Special Collector’s Edition of Cinema Paradiso, including both editions of the film, and some replicas of the original theater art used in 1988-89 to promote it. That was the first time I saw the “director’s cut”. I know there are many people who prefer the shorter version (which was the one that got the Oscar), but for me the longer (nearly an hour longer) version was a real treat.

Sometimes a group of characters will get so close to you, that you just hate to let go of them at the end of a movie. That’s how I think Marcie and I felt about the inhabitants of Giancaldo.  When the longer version came out, we got to see Elena get back together with Salvatore, if only briefly. We found  out (although we might easily have guessed) why they ended up separated. Along the way we also picked up some fun little tidbits, like finding out the whole story of what happened to reel 1 during the infamous two-theater showing of a single movie print.

But for me, I guess it was really just a great excuse to spend more time with the characters, and with Tornatore’s fine film-making. For example, I never would have seen that phone call with Elena where just the focus follows her voice and Salvatore’s back and forth across a rainy street in the middle of the night. So glad that didn’t end up in the dust bin.

I think this film is going to be around for a long time. In the special features that accompany that collector’s edition, there is a story about the Little Italy film festival in Baltimore, where it was being shown (appropriately on an outside wall) each year. The festival is still going, and I’ve written to ask if it’s still on the schedule. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it is. It has that kind of staying power: you don’t care how many times you’ve seen it, you just look forward to watching it again, and again.

My wife will usually refuse to watch any movie more than once, regardless of how good it is...even if she fell asleep halfway through and missed the ending. We’ve lost track of how many times we’ve watched Cinema Paradiso, though, and are planning to watch it again, since she just gifted me with a new restoration on blue-ray disc. Can’t wait.