Cinema
A passion projected
Hilary Mantel
In the small Sicilian town of Giancaldo, the Paradiso cinema is a kind of alternative church. The priest is a good customer. He sits with a bell in his hand, and rings it loudly at the first sign of a screen kiss; but tears of sentiment leak from his eyes, and flow down celibate cheeks. We are in the 1940s, but the sounds in the street outside are mediaeval: the click of donkeys' hooves, a cacophony of bells.
Salvatore (Salvatore Cascio) is a father- less child of ten or 11, a spindly, frail mannikin with quick wits, who takes a proper childish pleasure in discomfiting his elders. His soldier father is missing in action and his mother is lonely and poor. Sent out in the morning to buy milk, Salvatore spends his whole day at the mesmerising Paradiso, and is found by his mother as dusk falls in the square. He is an altar boy, but the priest of his true vocation is the projectionist Alfredo (Philippe Noiret). At first Alfredo is testy and discouraging, driving out the mite with ursine roars. But Salvatore is persistent; Alfredo, a projectionist since before the talkies, begins to tolerate and then love him. Hanging around hour after hour, the boy picks up his skills.
Giuseppe Tornatore's film is a charming and gently humorous work of semi- autobiography, composed with an atten- tive painter's eye and a cinematic cross- referencing of images and motifs; the director, rather later than the events por- trayed in the film, began his own career as a village projectionist. And in Giancaldo they are passionate about the cinema; the Paradiso in its heyday is packed at every show. Love affairs and vendettas are car- ried on there. Babies are breast-fed and flasks of wine are passed around. It's terribly Latin, emotional and noisy. Salva- tore sees Chaplin flicker and caper to tinkling music, and John Wayne fell Indi- ans from the saddle. His speech is embel- lished with fragments of movie dialogue: 'You black-hearted pig, I'll smash your face in.' The cinema, as much as the church, provides the town with its com- munal psychic life; one day Alfredo turns his projector out into the square, and the vast shadowy figures dance through walls and flesh.
The first part of the film is disciplined, and Tornatore does not sentimentalise the deprivations of his characters' lives, though the projection-room fire which blinds Alfredo is a blatant tear-jerking device. Unfortunately, as Salvatore grows up, the interest recedes. As he takes over from Alfredo as projectionist, the film strives with too much speed and fury to relate everything in politics and everyday life to the cinema. The boy's teenage agonies, as he slouches moodily after a proud blonde, are of the conventional type; and when he steals a kiss in the projection-room from his blue-eyed beauty, one feels much sub- tle work has been negated. When, subse- quently, the lovers run through a cornfield, it is tempting to stamp and make rude noises like the patrons of the Paradiso; Ennio Morricone's score becomes the orchestral equivalent of some lurid Neapo- litan ice-cream. The film's first hour flashes by. The second drags, and starts one off with mutinous questions: how is it that Alfredo, an old man when his disciple is a child, does not die till Salvatore is in middle age, a famous film director with a serious trench-coat and a distinguished, pan-European sort of face?
When, in a brief coda, Salvatore returns to his village for Alfredo's funeral, the town square is packed with ears. Alfredo's mementos have been carefully preserved for the local boy made good. But the Paradiso is derelict; everyone has a video- re.corder.
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