CINEMA PARADISO (Giuseppe Tornatore)

-

I do not know where to begin. CINEMA PARADISO is so enchanting a movie, and so grandiose it leaves you in awe and in a state of euphoria. I only saw it once. Imagine those who've seen it countless times.

More than a tale of friendship, of star-crossed lovers, and of love for the movies, CINEMA PARADISO is also a tale of cultural identity, where cinema has become not only a form of entertainment but a means of unifying a society and documenting history.

In 1980s Rome, filmmaker Salvatore DiVita (Jacques Perrin) is told that Alfredo, a man from his childhood village has died.

Flashback to late 1940s. Young Salvatore (Salvatore Cascio) who is nicknamed "Toto" sparks an unusual friendship with the town's film projectionist, Alfredo (Philippe Noiret). Toto is curious and wily, and is eager to know a lot about cinema. This stems from longing of his father who is sent to war in Russia, and may never even come home.

Father Adelfio (Leopoldo Trieste) oversees the film exhibitions, sort of like a precursory movie censor a la MPAA of the United States and MTRCB of the Philippines. All the kissing scenes in the movies being shown are ordered cut; hence none of the townsfolk, despite years of watching movies have ever seen a screen kiss.

I'll skip a few details (believe me, this is for your own good) and proceed as Toto grows up as a young man (Marco Leonardi) who is smitten by a young lass named Maria (Antonella Attilli). However the age old class separation hinders their budding love affair, and throughout their time together, the town, the people they know, especially Alfredo, and the Cinema Paradiso bear witness to their ordeal.

Told in classic melodrama fashion, with dashes of humor, wisdom for the ages, and the undying reverence for cinema both as an art and as a cultural marker, CINEMA PARADISO in its uncut 174-minutes version is like  personal memories of you growing up, recorded through photographs, letters, and spoken in vivid detail. Few films can make this sort of cinematic experience where you share a part of you with the story, and the story lends itself to you as if in eternity.

CINEMA PARADISO is hard to forget, with the breathtaking cinematography, the majestic locations, and Ennio Morricone's unforgettable mesmerizing score. It just leaves that audiovisual imprint in your memory.

And the way they kiss in the movie- Star Cinema will be shamed.

I felt gloomy as Alfredo's remains were being laid to rest, but what caught me in tears was when they were demolishing the CINEMA PARADISO. It's as if the end of cinema, and the end of all that was good.

This goes on the list of the Top 10 films that can make me cry, along with BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY and INANG YAYA.

Rating: 5/5 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ANINO SA LIKOD NG BUWAN (Jun Lana, 2015)

-
Image
* English title "Shadow behind the Moon" The best term to describe Jun Lana's latest film would be a cinematic charade- a game of identities, of motives, of suppressed passions, and of uncertainty. Or the film equivalent of a Russian doll, if you will. "Anino sa Likod ng Buwan" only has three characters- husband and wife Nando (Anthony Falcon) and Emma (LJ Reyes) and military man Joel (Luis Alandy). What started as a seemingly routine banter among friends gradually and intensely escalated into an examination of society, where the definition of immorality is blurred during a time of insurgency.  And in fact, the film does discuss the subject of immorality from various paradigms. When does adultery become acceptable, and to whom? Is sexual liberation more heinous than murder? Why is immorality always a double standard? The film plays out the ideas in endless games. Or are they really games at all? Lana could have stopped there, but he didn...
Read more

TUHOG (Jeffrey Jeturian)

-
Image
Film within a film-structured movies are always interesting watch. Not only do they provide a much-needed deconstruction of form and content of cinema itself, but also that much-needed emotional punch a cinephile would surely love.  Like in BAD EDUCATION (Almodovar, 2004), we witness the characters tell the back story via montage, as if we are part of the cast of characters watching an actual movie. The form was successful in evoking pain and regret, and also of empathy. In TUHOG, Jeffrey Jeturian and screenwriter Bing Lao tackles sensational media in the Philippines, especially in cinema. The film opens as a film producer hears a pitch for a possible movie- a story of a grandfather who rapes his own granddaughter.  The director of the film soon after visits the victim of the crime, Floring (Ina Raymundo). Coercing both she and her mother, Perla (Irma Adlawan) to sell them the movie rights to their story, we witness as exploitation cinema unfolds. To think of it, capitaliz...
Read more

BIGKIS (Neal Tan, 2014)

-
Image
As an advocacy film, BIGKIS (INTERTWINED) gets its message across. The state of maternal healthcare in the Philippines is downright depressing, with mothers seated on the floor of public hospitals due to shortage of beds, medical equipment and hospital staff. The baby better be gaping through the birth canal before the mother receives serious medical attention.  Such social issue has been featured countless times in local documentaries and even in a feature film (2011's BAHAY BATA), but BIGKIS pushes the envelope further by bridging a connection between mother and child by means of breastfeeding, and in doing so, promoting breastfeeding in the process.  As a drama, the film tends to squeeze too much tragedy from the downtrodden lives of its characters that a lot of the dialogue feels staged for us to feel sorry for their countless miseries. Mariel (LJ Reyes), a teenage mother deals with an unwanted pregnancy and worse, the abandonment of her baby's father (Pancho ...
Read more