CINEMA PARADISO: 4K Blu-ray (Miramax/Umbrella, 1988) Arrow Academy

I am not – generally speaking – a very emotional man at the movies. Personally, I think there is enough in life to cry about. So, only a few movies have ever given me pause and the proverbial ‘lump in the throat’. Thus, it is saying much that I openly wept salty tears in 1988 upon my first viewing of director, Giuseppe Torantore’s Cinema Paradiso. Not only did it deeply touched my heart, leaving it sore but hopeful, with the tragedy its protagonists, Toto and Elena never found love as adults, even if their passion, arguably, endured despite going their separate ways, but the picture was a colossal celebration, at least for me, of Toto’s appreciation for, and love of great cinema art. We are a rare and dying breed – film lovers, I mean. Most people go to the movies, merely to be amused – something to preoccupy their eyes as they stuff their mouths with popcorn. But if you truly love the movies, then you enter a darkened theater each time, hoping to be enthralled – virtually gripped by the images on that screen, entering those perfect worlds without end. 2020, I believe, has been a year where we desperately crave this sort of pop-u-tainment, mostly to anesthetize our collective fears – the world outside the theater, too much with us these days – making genuine escapism a real/reel challenge.

Toto’s admiration for the movies suffers from a different angst, the slings and arrows of devastating Catholic censorship throughout the years. Hence, in its unanticipated climax, Cinema Paradiso suddenly overwhelmed with its tsunami of outtakes, excised from those childhood remembrances Toto only thought he knew, but carefully preserved by another lover of movie art – the projectionist, Alfredo. And truer still, the picture was a love story between these two men in the truest and most heart-rending sense; the orphaned and impressionable Toto – both as a boy, and later, teenager in love, and, the fatherly projectionist, Alfredo, exquisitely realized by portly Philippe Noiret.  Thus, when Torantore elected to revisit his masterpiece some years later with an extended cut, my heart beat a little quicker in anticipation of an even greater epic to emerge. Sadly, the extended cut inserted a failed reunion between Toto and Elena, defeating the whole point to that aforementioned final montage of excised clips from the movies; Toto, having grown up to liberate his own heart from its self-imposed purgatory with a myriad of expressions of ‘movie’ love, as denied, not only his viewing for so many decades by Catholic censorship, but also in life. Mama mia, if only life could be more like the movies. If anything, Torontore’s finale in the original unequivocally proved no one can censor the heart. No one should ever even try.

Anyone who truly loves movies must adore Cinema Paradiso. It’s not a debatable point.  Clearly, this is an astonishingly affectionate and wistful romance of celluloid, only superficially about a lonely boy’s life-long love affair with post-war Italy’s movie culture. I don’t know what I find more stirring about Tornatore’s Roman à clef, the effortless way he gingerly massages three extraordinarily gifted actors of disparately handsome looks and as abundant acting styles (Salvatore Cascio, Marco Leonardi, Jacques Perrin) into one seamless and perfectly transitional pièce de résistance embodied in our titular hero, Salvatore 'Totò' Di Vita – orphaned in the war and raised by a careworn, though nevertheless devoted matriarch (Antonella Attili in his youth/Pupella Maggio, in her emeritus years) or Philippe Noiret’s Alfredo, that big and lovable, gentle teddy bear of a man, prematurely aged and blinded in a fateful accident inside his projection booth. To cap it all off is composer, Ennio Morricone’s haunting score, an affecting miracle of loveliness, never to devolve into saccharine, serving both the remarkably subdued images on the screen - informing on each characters’ emotional content – and yet just as easily absorbed as a symphonic magnum opus apart from the movie. Irrefutably, Cinema Paradiso is Tornatore’s treasure, bequeathed to film lovers all over the world, a stunning achievement and very sincere reminder of the communal impact all truly inspired art possesses, particularly when unfurled from reels at our local Bijou.

Twice, our Totò is love-struck by this proverbial ‘thunderbolt’. First, as an impressionable child, skipping school and shirking his duties as altar boy to skulk off to the unprepossessing movie house in his tiny village - later, rebuilt as the lux-lined ‘Paradiso’ by the town’s wealthiest patron, Spaccafico (Enzo Cannavale). The Paradiso fast becomes the hub of the village, an oasis risen from the rubble and squalor of their bombed-out lives in the hamlet of Giancaldo. Transparently, it serves a purpose, to unite a community devastated by the war. As an impressionable child, Toto is as absorbed into these shimmering illusions set before him, eventually censured by Father Adelfio (Leopoldo Trieste) who is sternly concerned about the movies’ impact on the moral welfare of his community. Adelfio liberally applies his own brand of Catholic censorship to even the remotest hints of passion as innocuously represented on the silver screen by a singular embrace or ardent kiss. Ah me…what dear old Adelfio would have said about today’s cinema…hoo, boy! But I digress. Much to his mother’s chagrin, the artifice of the movies serves a real/reel purpose in Toto’s education. It shapes the enduring passions in his young life as well as his aspirations for the future. Above all else, it plies his unquenchable thirst to discover a parallel between his own life with these celluloid daydreams; more real to him than anything else. Begrudgingly, Toto’s mother condescends to allow him to apprentice with the Paradiso’s projectionist, Alfredo; a surrogate for the father lost to him in the war. And although this mentored friendship will remain paramount and stationary throughout Toto’s life, as he segues into adolescence as a raven-haired handsome young man, Toto’s heart is stirred by the purity of a grander amour with Elena Mendola (Agnese Nano), the daughter of a wealthy family briefly vacationing in his village.

From Italy’s sun-kissed beaches to its moonlit and rain-soaked cobblestone byways at night, theirs is an extraordinary affaire du Coeur, eloquently handled by Tornatore with a lithe appreciation for the fragility of young love, unaccustomed to these pulsating rhythms of premature separation and ultimate heartbreak. Cinema Paradiso is really two epics tightly pressed up against each other with an occasional overlap, the passage of time and the ephemeral quality of life itself intruding upon Toto and Elena’s window of opportunity for authentic ardor. Only capable of a more robust reflection in the sunset of middle-age, Toto’s panged affections for Elena in his youth staggers the mind as it so cruelly tears at his heart. While the maxim ‘life doesn’t always give us what we want…though it very often lends us what we deserve’ seems to apply, the finale in the original cut of Cinema Paradiso is actually more prescient and forgiving of these impossibly formed and perfect illusions originally ensconced in Hollywood’s movie-land culture. With the passage of time, the proverbial ‘happy ending’ has been eroded both by changing audience tastes and Toto’s mature reflections, foreshadowed at the start as Toto’s aged mother writes her estranged adult son, now a famous Fellini-esque film maker in Rome, a letter to inform him of Alfredo’s passing. In Toto’s youth, Alfredo was the steady rock, the influential male figure in his life.

After his life-altering accident, with Toto becoming Alfredo’s eyes – literally – their bro-mantic relationship only deepened, centered on their innate love of the movies. Yet, after Toto’s conscripted stint in the army, and furthermore, suspecting his heartbreak over losing Elena to derail a young man’s future, Alfredo self-sacrifice, sets aside his genuine affection for this son he never had, cruelly making Toto promise he will never look back, either in anger or regret. The ramifications of these tearful goodbyes at a railway station are, at first, not yet entirely understood. It is only when an unmarked canister of film arrives at Toto’s fashionable apartment in Rome decades later, that the exiled past comes flooding forth; Alfredo, having squirreled away virtually every piece of censurable footage excised from the movies over the years, now lovingly edited into one tear-jerking tapestry of self-reflection. As Toto spent most of his childhood and youth bitter sweetly daydreaming inside the Paradiso, these long-lost apparitions appear to him now almost as the missing pages from his own past imperfect – or rather – the imaginary one he once hoped for. Reality again eclipses this most idolized of comparative reflections. And yet, it all suddenly makes perfect sense, the past come full circle to enrich and inform the present, and hopefully, to direct a wounded soul through the labyrinth of middle-aged loneliness. Movie art becomes the penultimate liberation from all Toto’s stagnated and lingering doubts. 

You can learn an awful lot from the movies. This is, or rather was the supremely satisfying message and finale to Cinema Paradiso as it existed in 1988. But then, in 2002 an inexplicable – and I would sincerely argue – unforgiveable alteration occurred. Unable to leave well enough alone, and perhaps nagged by the fact he had shot so much more footage than was ever used, someone convinced Tornatore to revisit Cinema Paradiso with a ‘director’s cut’ – erroneously marketed as ‘the New Version’ by Miramax distribution. In an era where it has become something of the fashion for virtually every director to suggest their movies, as initially screened and beloved by audiences around the world, were somehow a compromise of the picture they actually set out to make, I would like to take this opportunity to suggest to all directors that whatever misgivings remain in their heads, the public decides the fate of their art once it is released into theaters. They are no longer the custodian of its imagry, nor do they have the right to alter the past for those of us who fell in love with it in the first place. George Lucas…are you listening?

Personal opinion of course, but I do not really care to see any movie re-envisioned, re-edited or, in the most appalling cases, bastardized by directors who, having acquired stature and clout, wielding both indiscriminately to suit their middle-age perspectives grown saltier, now gauche enough to consider their originals as grotesquely naïve and in desperate need of a new, though hardly improved Band-Aid fix; cutting out a communally cherished moment here, adding a new snippet or sound bite from some undisclosed archival bit, shelved long ago and never intended for public consumption; remixing, redubbing, and, in the most egregious cases, populating their cinema landscapes with altered CGI trickery from the new and ever-expanding toy box of play tools to ‘enhance’ their visual milieu, as to equally piddle upon our collective golden memories of their original craftsmanship. George Lucas, you are not listening! But I digress.

Tornatore’s re-imagining of Cinema Paradiso is one of those egregious and indefensible rewrites. The 2002 release of Cinema Paradiso substitutes a sort of rank ‘show and tell’ of the ‘missing pieces’ from Toto’s life, utterly to deprive the audience of that mystery and wonderment stitched into the original’s well-formulated poetic license, having then deliberately omitted portions while perfectly preserving our hero’s memories of his own past for the rest of us. Fifty minutes of footage is ‘restored’ in the official 2002 ‘Director’s Cut’; another whole ‘half’ of a movie. Yet, it achieves nothing, except to extend, rather than augment, this simple story. A few carelessly inserted sexual encounters between the young couple are offset by the ridiculousness of almost thirty-eight minutes applied to the last act. These additions propel the narrative forward into an entirely unrealized and utterly pointless third act. Toto, having wept warm tears inside the screening room and later, while attending Alfredo’s funeral in Giancaldo – is reunited with ‘remnants’ from his nearly forgotten past. Betraying Alfredo’s promise to never look back, Toto now begins to see false Elenas popping up all over the place, or rather, just one he repeatedly keeps bumping into in Rome. The girl, a spitting image for the one denied him so many decades earlier, is actually Elena’s daughter. Elena herself (now played by Brigitte Fossey) lives in quiet desperation with her more prominent husband.

Toto and Elena are reunited, briefly. They share a rather passionless indiscretion while the husband and daughter are away. Yet, unable to come to terms with pretty much anything, they are parted once more, only this time on mutually amicable terms, and presumably, for all time, recognizing, with an even more maudlin clarity, that the past cannot be recreated or even rekindled for either of them in the present - decidedly, not for the future. There is a very good reason why imperfect love affairs endure, particularly at the movies, and, more importantly, in our minds. Consider: do we really need to see Ilsa and Victor Lazslo arrive safely in America at the end of Casablanca or follow what actually happened to Scarlett and Rhett in Gone With the Wind after he ‘frankly’ stopped ‘giving a damn?’ The answer is, no – because ultimately it is only in the mind’s eye where true love - imperfectly perfect, real (reel) or imagined, is sustained, faultlessly encapsulated and even more affectionately recalled through rose-colored lenses of false memory, and just as easily corruptible by our self-deluding idealism. No trice in life is excellence itself – no kidding. But if we skew any reminiscence through the miscellanies of a reverie, it can remain dishonestly venerated as ‘the one that got away’. And for better or worse, sometimes this lie is more potently fulfilling than the truth. Tornatore’s new finale plays merely as more ‘lost and found’ than ‘gone, but never to be forgotten’ and it insincerely wounds, if not entirely dismantles the more eloquent reflections put forth more succinctly in the original. It also alters the affinity audiences have for his original vision.  Put bluntly, we get ‘more’ without getting ‘better’.

My best advice to anyone never having seen the director’s cut of Cinema Paradiso is to avoid it entirely. Your life, as well as your respect for this movie will not be enriched by the viewing experience. You will, however, be able to discover nirvana of a kind in Arrow Academy’s ‘new’ 4K release of Cinema Paradiso. Perhaps to settle the argument as to which version of the movie is the preferred, only the original theatrical release has been granted a 4K upgrade. Arrow’s previous Blu-ray release contained both cuts, restored and remastered. Only the theatrical has received a 4K upgrade here, but the ‘director’s edition’ has also been included on standard Blu-ray. And honestly, the biggest improvement between that Blu-ray release and this new 4K edition is to overall grain levels. Viewing the 4K in projection is uncannily film-like. Color fidelity is remarkably similar to Arrow’s previous Blu-ray experience. Although colors are undoubtedly a tad more refined in 4K, the difference here is marginal at best; proof positive that Arrow did right by the movie on their first stab in standard hi-def nearly 4 years ago. Both editions have been sourced from the same immaculate 35mm negative, framed in 1.67:1. Arrow’s 4K features the same cleaned-up 2.0 stereo PCM and 5.1 DTS remaster. The 2.0 is as close as possible to the original release of Cinema Paradiso. Still, it is hard to quibble over the subtle, but exacting precision inherent in this carefully re-purposed 5.1 soundtrack. Everything from Morricone’s score to the subtlest grunts and/or dialogue has acquired a richer sonic depth. The theatrical version features a fascinating blended commentary with Giuseppe Tornatore and Italian critic, Millicent Marcus. Arrow has also ported over the same extras as were featured on its Blu-ray release: A Dream of Sicily, the superb, near hour-long 2000 documentary on the film, and, two featurettes, A Bear and a Mouse in Paradise, and the less than ten-minute, The Kissing Sequence. We also get the original trailer.  Still MIA from this release are all of the Miramax extras that were a part of its own 2006 release: Exploring a Timeless Classic, and, Little Italy Love Story: Cinema Paradiso Style, plus Cucina Paradiso: the Food Network’s tribute. It should be noted that none of these sloppily put together junkets was particularly appealing and hence, none are missed herein. Bottom line: Arrow’s 4K reissue of Cinema Paradiso is a quality affair that represents the movie at its most film-like. But honestly, their Blu-ray was not all that off the mark. Discerning eyes will notice the minute differences in grain and textures, but only on very – very – large screens.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

5+

VIDEO/AUDIO

5+

EXTRAS

4