Cinema Paradiso - An absolute masterpiece!!

Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1988)



Yesterday I saw this movie. I'm out of adjectives for this. I might be generally a sentimental person. But this is the first movie that moved me so much that tears didn't stop from my eyes till I slept under its spell.



The movie is like Great Expectations meets Umberto Eco (Remember Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana..). Its so simple a narrative told in flash backs in the most straight forward way - it touches you in particular if you love cinema and movie making and sentimental about history.



It is an ode to the kind of theaters that used to play movies and when they used to rule the entire entertainment segment of the lives of small town's people. Even though it is set in the Sicilian village post world war II, I could identify with it because I grew up in a town where there were few theaters like that during my childhood and adolescence. They met the same fate too.



Alfredo in the movie - "Living here day by day, you think it's the center of the world. You
believe nothing will ever change. Then you leave: a year, two years.
When you come back, everything's changed. The thread's broken. What you
came to find isn't there. What was yours is gone. You have to go away
for a long time... many years... before you can come back and find your
people. The land where you were born. But now, no. It's not possible.
Right now you're blinder than I am."



It is so true. When I go back to my place I feel the same sadness that the grown up Toto feels when he turns around and sees the dilapidated soon to be broken down hall across the road. So much of change yet it is only few years.



Three things that touched me - Alfredo and Toto's relationship, Toto's love stories (with the theatre and with the girl) and the simply beautiful end.



Not a single frame is wasted, not a single dialogue is wasted, everything makes sense at the end and yet your eyes are moist. Guess that is the power of cinema.



One scene that haunted me - When Toto realizes finally that he is not going to see his dad for sure and is coming back from the war time office with his distraught mom, he sees the Italian poster of Gone with the wind and smiles at Clark Gable. Alfredo's description of his dad that he looks like Clark Gable left that image of his dad and he can continue keeping it.



A beautiful cinema, an ode to cinema and the forgotten theatres, the life they carried, the share they had in the lives of people. Must watch in any movie buff's list of movies.

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