Giuseppe Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso" is an anomaly.
It is flauntingly romantic without being trite or melodramatic. It is a deeply sentimental love story that defies the harsh skepticism of our modern romantic sensibility, our jaded reluctance to be suckered by romance.
Indeed, the film, playing tonight in Spaulding Auditorium, has a nostalgic air of old romance to it, of Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh, that seduces one into watching it as though it were of an earlier period.
But the central romance in "Cinema Paradiso" occurs not between a suave and well-oiled movie star and his heart-sighing lover, but between a young boy and a little movie house named Cinema Paradiso in the small Italian village of Giancaldo.
Realized partly by detailed cinematographic attention to color and movement, the film's nostalgic feel is appropriate to the plot, which takes place largely in the past.
It begins in the present when the protagonist, Salvatore, now a successful middle-aged filmmaker, receives news forcing him to return home after nearly 30 years of estrangement. Anticipating his return, he reminisces about his childhood in the years before he left. Thereafter the narrative turns retrospective, with occasional and dramatically well-placed glances into the present, until the last 19 minutes, when Salvatore returns to Giancaldo.
The extended flashback focuses on the unusual friendship between young Salvatore (Salvatore Cascio), and old Alfredo (Jacques Perrin), the gruff and big-hearted projectionist at the Cinema Paradiso. The flashback begins with Salvatore secretly following the town priest to the theater one Sunday after his altar boy duties, where the Catholic priest is commissioned to preview the films for "obscenity" before the public is subjected to them.
The priest sits alone in the theater frenetically ringing a little bell each time a kiss happens, upon which Alfredo splices the scene from the movie -- a beautiful example of the charming little quirks and character idiosyncrasies that make "Cinema Paradiso" so rich a film.
Here Salvatore falls in love with the magic of the pictures on the screen, and ingratiates himself with Alfredo in order to work the projector and be closer to the cinema.
At the core of "Cinema Paradiso" is the wonderful surrogate father-son relationship between Alfredo and Salvatore; the former having never had a son, the latter having lost his father in WWI.
But as much as they are playing missing parts in one other's lives, the old man and the young boy are brought together by a common love for the cinema.
The backdrop of their friendship is always the Cinema Paradiso -- its magic, its romance, its fantasy -- and in the foreground is always the village of Giancaldo, bearing equally bold strokes of magic, romance and fantasy.
The border between the reality of the village and the imagination of the Cinema Paradiso is thus blurred. The villagers are larger-than-life, and there is often a surreal quality to the movement and look of the film. The romance and wonder of the movies is the idiom in which Alfredo and Salvatore communicate.
Indeed, there is a constant dialogue between movies and reality in "Cinema Paradiso," providing us a glimpse into the mind and soul of a boy, or a man, who accesses his life through the projector of a movie house.
"Cinema Paradiso" is a richly textured film, beautifully shot, honestly acted and many-leveled. It is a story of loves; the love of an art, the love of a mentor, the love of a woman, a lost father, a mother, a hometown and a country. It is a romance in countless ways. But above all, it is an homage to the love of life.
