Giuseppe Tornatore
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso

New Cinema Paradiso

A thin line separates the past from the present. A fragment of yesterday unexpectedly imposes itself on the mind and today's boundaries become indefinite. Fade: the curtain opens and lets the eyes of the present immerse themselves in the past. So, in the heart of the night begins the journey back into memories, and it's the call of the heart that brings Salvatore Di Vita back to his past.

Salvatore Di Vita was just a child when he tried to sneak into the Cinema Paradiso booth, when he tried to spy on the screening of American films even before they were censored by the parish priest of the small town where the cinema was the only place of entertainment in a Sicily devoured by poverty and backwardness of the 1940s. The cinema was the window to a world Salvatore could not even dream of, but had learned to love. And it is the love for cinema that gives Salvatore the greatest gift: the friendship with Alfredo (played by a paternal Philippe Noiret), a man hardened by a land that takes everything and returns nothing. After being dismissed several times from the projection room, Salvatore convinces Alfredo to teach him the tricks of the trade and to keep him by his side during the screenings in that small room which will serve as the backdrop to his days first as a child and then as an adolescent. A magical place where the friendship between the two grows. The projection room will become their refuge, the place of cinematic quotes, the spot where the magic of cinema will unfold with all its strength, the world enclosed in a tiny town where growing up meant becoming a priest or gendarme. Alfredo will follow Salvatore up to adolescence, standing by him when he encounters his first love and having his eyes guide him when he can no longer rely on his own, urging him to study, not to settle for what he has, until forcing him to leave and embark on the "Path of Hope." "If you can't resist and come back, don't come to visit me, I won't let you into my house." After thirty years, however, Salvatore, now a successful director, is forced to return to his origins due to the sudden death of Alfredo, returning to a reality where time seems to have stood still, despite the evident signs of progress that ill fit with the traditional landscape creating a sad dissonance in the eyes of the viewer that does not even dissolve with the demolition of Cinema Paradiso, now completely abandoned to itself. After this painful journey into the past, Salvatore will return to Rome because now in Giancaldo, "there are only ghosts," but he will carry with him the last thought left to him by Alfredo, an object capable of effortlessly crossing that thin demarcation line between past and present.

A human and social fresco, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988 film) accompanies us to a land without pretense or future, of which Giuseppe Tornatore gives us a delicate and sometimes static portrait. The deserted streets and the cinema filled with people, the cinema becomes the scene of the unfolding of social life: loves that are born, children who grow up, men who age, and even the approaching death. The physical and social immobility of the village is set against the cinema room where life seems to resume its dynamic and constant flow of events. And in this, the narration adapts to the context, becoming slower and sometimes absent, lingering on almost static shots that highlight the immobility of the village. The slowness of living marries the discretion of the camera that enters the scene with almost imperceptible movements, nearing or distancing from what it watches. Nuovo Cinema Paradiso mixes a good dose of healthy values, explaining them through a series of binaries: the old and the child, the past and the present, hope and resignation, departure and return, leaving the homeland or surviving in it.

A film I loved for the discretion with which it was directed, with a simple style without too many sparkles or stylistic leaps. Wonderful soundtrack, an extraordinary Morricone, translates even the most complex ideas into emotion, speaking to the soul as only he can do. Tornatore steps aside and entrusts his land, his characters, and his story with the task of narrating to the spectator, an attempt repeated also with Baaria (2009 film) but not succeeded with the same naturalness. New Cinema Paradiso is certainly an Oscar-worthy film, to be watched in any case, despite the excessive and not understated emotional surge that sometimes makes it fall into the banal, despite the voids and slowness that recur in the narration. Despite everything, it is a film that speaks to the heart and should be seen and appreciated with the heart.