Cinema Paradiso (R)
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Every movie lover has his own coming-of-age story: an individuated introduction to that mix of romantic ardor, religious transport, and drug abuse that is every cineaste's daily bread. Since movie love has become the world's unofficial secular faith, it's curious that there haven't been more films like this 1988 "classic," which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film (and placed second to Life is Beautiful in Landmark Theatres' recent poll of its audience's foreign faves). In any case, for film geeks, Cinema Paradiso can make you feel like you've been swindled out of your own memories. Set in a postwar Southern Italy that's like a spun-sugar mockery of the neorealists' tragedic ruins, this movie about a melancholy projectionist (Philippe Noiret) and his cute little protégé (Salvatore Cascio) scavenges Fellini scenes and whips them into cotton candy. The cute little protege pokes his head through a curtain in the small-town Cinema Paradiso, Ennio Morricone's violins wail, the projector's light flares in the camera...and life-transforming magic is supposed to happen. But director Giuseppe Tornatore is simply too clumsy and too vain to pull off the movie's naked, schmaltzy melodrama. More obnoxious than the Capra-like processional of town nuts, crosseyed hookers, silly priests, and canny peasants is Tornatore's self-portrait as a world-storming auteur named Salvatore Di Vita (is that "savior of life"?). Revisiting the Cinema Paradiso in his silver-fox middle age, Di Vita is treated like a descending god by the locals; his elderly mama simpers, "I always hear a different woman in your bed--but I do not hear love in their voices." When Fellini monumentalized himself in 8 1/2, he had seven and a half superb films to his credit. What's Tornatore's excuse? (Matthew Wilder)
Review by Matthew Wilder
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