Mine aftener i paradis
I remember when “Cinema Paradiso” (“Nuovo Cinema Paradiso”)
came out. On Danish TV, the movie reviewer (Ole Michelsen) was gushing over the
movie, but I did not much care for it, being in the wrong age bracket at the time
(15 years of age). 10-15 years later I finally watched it and was surprised to
learn that I liked it. That is already a long time ago now and I never went
back to it until now. Revisiting “Cinema Paradiso felt like coming back to an
old friend. Everything looks the same but completely different at the same.
Pretty much the topic of the movie.
In present day Italy, an old woman (Pupella Maggio) is
trying to reach her son, Salvatore (Jacques Perrin). Salvatore lives in Rome,
is a famous movie director and has not been home for thirty years. The mother
finally gets through to his girlfriend who in turn tells Salvatore that a man
called Alfredo has died. This makes Salvatore reminiscence about old days, which
then becomes the bulk of the movie.
We are now back in a small Sicilian town, Giancaldo, shorty
after the Second World War. Salvatore, now known as Toto (Salvatore Cascio), is
a naughty little boy (8 years?) who works as an altar boy and spends most of the
time in the projector room at the church, turned cinema at night, with the
projectionist Alfredo (Philippe Noiret). His life at home is miserable with a lonely
mother (Antonella Attili) whose husband never returned from the war, but with
Alfredo, Toto experiences magic. The priest requires Alfredo to cut away all
the naughty parts and Toto revels in these cutaways.
There is a fire in the projection room and Alfredo, although
saved by Toto, loses his sight. When a local lottery winner opens a new cinema,
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, Toto, as the only skilled projectionist available, is
hired with blind Alfredo to guide him.
Fast forward to the mid-fifties, Toto has become a young man
(Marco Leonardi) in high school who still runs the projector. When a new girl,
Elena (Agnese Nano) arrive in town, Toto falls in love. Unfortunately, her
wealthy family does not approve so when Toto returns after military service and
years out of contact with Elena, he leaves for Rome with Alfredo telling him
never to come back.
Now, 30 years later, having remembered all this, Salvatore
returns to Giancaldo for Alfredo’s funeral. The town both look the same and
very different. His life as it was now only lives on in his memory.
This is a movie that relies heavily on nostalgia. It is a
remembrance of times past in the Proustian form where the reality we are
presented is not necessarily an objective reality but a remembered reality. The
things that made an impression, of joy and passion, misery and misfortune and
people looking and acting precisely as you want them to be remembered.
Salvatore sees all his old friends when he returns, but they are like strangers
to him because 30 years of nostalgia removes them from objective reality and, truthfully,
who stays the same after 30 years?
While the life remembered is uniquely Salvatore’s, we all
share that experience of remembering the past and so we can all relate to the process
if not the actual content. We remember what made an impression on us in our
childhood, and we remember our father and mother figures or our first love.
True, Salvatore’s memories may be a tad more exotic and interesting than the
rest of us, a film of my memories would be both sad and boring to anybody else,
but they are also made more interesting by the patina of nostalgia, of the
longing for a paradise lost. The name of the cinema is not coincidental and the
Danish title given to the movie, literally “My evenings in paradise”, is a
reference to the personal paradise lost of Salvatore.
It is an incredible movie to watch, especially because it
succeeds in dragging you in. Time flies by and by the time it ended I was
surprised to see how late it was. Finishing the movie is like waking from a
dream that took you somewhere else. I often have a problem with Italians and
their very... expressionist... way of acting, but I got past this super fast.
Even young Toto’s shrill cry of “Alfredo Alfredo” becomes less annoying after a
while and with Ennio Morricone’s awesome and dreamlike scoring, the dream is
now our dream.
If there is any complaint it is that Salvatore never returned
to his family for 30 years. That kind of makes him a dick.
“Cinema Paradiso” won a ton of prices, not least the Grand
Jury prize in Cannes and the Best Foreign Language award at the Academy Awards.
That the Academy did not deign to nominate it for anything else, does not speak
to the credit of the Academy.
“Cinema Paradiso” remains a great movie and it has aged
incredibly well. It is possibly even better today than I remember it, and I can
only give it my highest recommendations.
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