Maybe we should keep the kissing parts in both our movies and our lives. Postwar Italy is a wasteland of anger and loss, a country blasted to hell and back for the glory of Il Duce, and for what? Dead husbands and ruined infrastructure. A singular escape exists for young Salvatore in the form of the local cinema, and in the saint of a projectionist Alfredo who puts up with his nonsense. Existence is authoritarian and cruel, teachers beating students for not knowing their multiplication tables and priests censoring movies for entire communities. Cinema is dangerous in its implication, but also dangerous in its projection. Alfredo gives everything he has, both to Salvatore and to his community. He teaches the young boy his art and shares his gift with the town, both inside the theatre and for free out on the wall when their craving for movies proves insatiable. Yet it’s that gift which causes the fire that blinds the old man. Salvatore too mounts on his own expeditions of futility, courting a girl endlessly who proves fleeting and eternally unavailable. When Salvatore throws off the yoke of suffocating life in this town of ghosts, he achieves cinematic success, apparently, but without the love associated with the emotions he sees depicted onscreen. There are elements here, but the film is so jumpy and spotty in its connective tissue that it becomes difficult to connect with Salvatore’s journey. Fleeting frames of elder Toto remembering his youth are apparently sufficient to explain his entire career and lack of connection with his past, and the jarring sense of loss captured in the conflagration of the first Cinema Paradiso is immediately undercut by the local lottery winner building a new one. No amount of saccharine Ennio Morricone scoring can help to buoy cinematic thinness.
Life is a film for Salvatore, something underscored by the film’s editing sensibilities. Match cuts are a characteristic feature throughout, pairing things seen projected on the silver screen with small-town life, from ringing bells to slaps. Movies are a group event, everyone whooping and crying at what they see, but for Salvatore in his youth, they’re larger than life. The lion seemingly vomiting up the film springs to life for him, frightening and beguiling. That is the experience conjured by good movies, and imitated hollowly by this one.
A movie starts to show in the cinema.
A match cut happens in the edit.
The movie does that shot of someone watching a movie with the projector making a halo over their head.
