Normally, I write these reviews for movies I am seeing for the first time. And like every month, my huge HBO Max watchlist had some movies that were leaving. One was for the Italian movie Cinema Paradiso. I wasn’t sure I had seen that before. It sounds familiar, so I opted to check it out. It turns out I had seen it before, years ago. My podcast partner Jen was dating a guy who loved the movie, she got into it, and I watched it with her.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t watch it again.
The movie opens with successful Italian movie director Salvatore “Toto” Di Vita learns someone back in the Scilian home town he hasn’t visited in 30 years has died. The man’s name was Alfredo, and he was the longtime projectionist at the town’s only movie theater. As a boy growing up in just after the end of the second World War, Toto didn’t have a male influence at home. His father, said to look like Clark Gable, was killed fighting against the Russians, and it looks like the only evidence Toto has of the man are some old photos. But when he isn’t falling asleep during Mass where he’s an altar boy, he’s down at the local single screen movie theater, bothering Alfredo. Alfredo’s work is nearly every day, and he has to edit out all the kissing scenes to keep the town’s priest happy. Toto, however, loves the movies. It’s obvious, and Alfredo gradually warms to the boy, keeping the lad out of trouble with his mother, and eventually teaching the kid his trade.
That’s the first half of the movie, the more humorous half. Writer/director Giuseppe Tomatore stuck a lot of humor into this first half, showing the eccentrics that live in and around the town. Regulars at the theater have their quirks. One man goes to take a nap, only to be awoken by the younger patrons. Another sits in the balcony and spits over the side. There was a couple having very discreet sex at one point and a mother breastfeeding. But when a crowd refuses to leave after a popular Italian comedy, Alfredo shows Toto how the magic of the movies can be shown outside the theater.
There is a distinct change of tone in the second half. An accident has left Alfredo unable to do his job, and Toto takes over, growing into a teenager and then young adult, finding love with a banker’s daughter, and then still seeing magic at the title location. If the first half is broad comedy, the second is a coming-of-age story, one that ends with a heartbroken Toto does what Alfredo wanted the boy to do all along, namely get out of town and seek his fortune. The implication is obvious: Alfredo was the father Toto really needed, and he is the reason Toto finally left to do great things, things he would have probably never done. By the end of the movie, when the adult Toto returns for the funeral, he’s successful in some ways, but hurting in others.
And yet, none of this feels like some sort of tonal whiplash. The movie deftly goes from the comedy of childhood to the romantic idealism of his adolescence effortlessly. And despite the fact I don’t much care for a lot of cinematic nostalgia, here it works not so much so because some filmmaker is trying to exploit my own childhood but because a character is looking directly at his own. That the movie changes tone as the character ages and makes it seem so natural, all while keeping Alfredo and the movie theater at the center of his life, is a testament both to the power of the motion picture for some people and what a good retelling of growing up can look like. I may have seen this one before, but I was extremely glad to revisit it.
Grade: A
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