TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020590/0205420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.8 KB | 85 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 73

A Priest of the Movie Faith


By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CINEMA PARADISO
Directed and Written by Giuseppe Tornatore


    Alone in the theater, Father Adelfio (Leopoldo Trieste), the
little Sicilian town's ex officio movie censor, rings a bell
whenever anything on the screen strikes him as salacious. Up
in the booth, Alfredo, the projectionist (Philippe Noiret, who
is becoming Spencer Tracy to our age), slaps a piece of paper
into the reel marking the spot the priest has X-rated. The
walls of Alfredo's aerie are festooned with ribbons of film he
has cut from movies before showing them to the public, for the
good father sees in even the most chaste movie kiss an occasion
for sin.

    Secretly watching these censorious rites, though not
entirely comprehending them, is a little boy named Toto (played
by a delightful discovery, Salvatore Cascio). For him, any
moving image is the nearest available occasion for bliss. An
indifferent altar boy to the priest, he is a passionate acolyte
to the projectionist, who is quite literally the keeper of a
flame (the arc lamps inside his machine), the cranky guardian
of a mystery more awesome -- or at least more attractive -- to
the child than anything the church has to offer.

    In this alternative religion, Toto will rise from novice (as
the projectionist's assistant) to parish priest (he takes over
when Alfredo is blinded in a nitrate-film fire) to bishop (he
becomes a director). But it is one of the many graces of Cinema
Paradiso that it is content merely to observe the analogies
between two faiths, not point up the conflict between them.
Writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore's manner is gently
reflective, not satirical. His largest aim, and greatest
success, is to re-create the lost spirit of a vanished movie
era: the late 1940s and early '50s.

    In that period, before television converted moving images
into visual tranquilizers -- pain and time killers sold over
the airwaves without prescription (or proscription) -- they
were stimulants to heroic-romantic imaginings.
Self-transcendence, if you will. The movies were especially
potent in the way they worked on the deprived sensibilities of
provincial youngsters. Sneaking out from under parental
disapproval, sheltering in the dark under the big, glowing
screen, innocently absorbing its fantastic representations of
faraway realities, surrendering to the belief that those
realities must be true (unendurable to think that the whole
world was as constricted as one little corner of Sicily was),
Toto comes close to becoming a generational archetype,
transcending the particulars of his own situation.

    But if he is seen with a certain sentiment, he is seen with
a certain bracing irony too. When he achieves adolescence (and
is played at this stage of his life by the appealing Marco
Leonardi), he conducts his first and, as it turns out, only
great love affair with the remote Elena (Agnese Nano) as if it
were an old-fashioned movie romance, something like one of
those doomy weepers Garbo used to do. Poor Toto. In this realm
he has only screen conventions to guide him.

    He is much luckier when it comes to work. For there, as the
film makes clear in its coda, the example of Alfredo is ever
before him. Maybe the old man's business was projecting dreams,
but the work was hard, hot, technically fussy and, as the
misadventure with the explosive nitrate film proves, dangerous.
It was essential for Alfredo to keep his wits, and his
skepticism, about him. In other words, to remain open to
fantasies but not be consumed by them. These are good lessons
for a would-be director. They are good lessons for everybody.
And no recent movie has taught them with more patient
sweetness.