Cinema Paradiso (1988)

The very first film that I have watched in Psychology of Film - Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, also known as Cinema Paradiso internationally. Personally, I really enjoy watching films but sadly, I have never really given myself enough opportunities to explore foreign language film like this one.

Since it was my first Italian film, not knowing anything about this film at all in advance had given me a fresh feeling - a feeling that was really great because it felt like I was pretty much anticipating all the time what was going to happen next in the film as I did not even know what genre the film was. So, when the film began, I had no clue at all what the film was about. However, as the film progressed, I was taken by the storyline as if I was living with the characters in the movie and grew together with them. Surprisingly, it made me realized that it was similar to our lives in general. We are always living in the present, not knowing what will be happening in the next moment of our lives. The way and the attitude I carried when watching this film had given me the exact same feeling I felt about my life and it felt exciting.

The film started with a scene where an old Italian woman, after 30 years of losing contact with her son was trying to get hold of him in Rome to get him the news of someone's death and funeral - someone named Alfredo. Salvatore Di Vita, a famous Italian film director was the son. When Salvatore knew about the news, he did not immediately call back home. In my mind, I was thinking about how horrible he was to his mother. But as I watched the movie up til the end, I realized that my first impression about him was wrong and I liked how the end of the movie had changed my thoughts. So, what actually happened in the end?

The film showed Salvatore's flashbacks when he was a six-year-old boy, nicknamed Toto. During the entire flashback, we were able to watch Toto's development and how he grew from a young innocent boy with overwhelming passion for films, who befriended a kind and caring projectionist of a cinema, Alfredo, to an adolescent Toto who fell in love with a beautiful girl named Elena. The film resembled the natural episodes of our lives and we could easily relate to the movie. We all went through childhood like Toto, we used to have passions in certain things that we loved and don't we all reminisce the innocent lives we used to live when we were at Toto's age? Then as we grow up, the activities that we used to love doing when we were young would become our dreams because we knew that we could work towards making them into ambitions. It was adorable to see how Toto's love for films since young never ended and he succeeded to become a film director himself.

To be honest, I really enjoyed every moment that Toto spent with Alfredo in the film. Toto would always come up and annoy Alfredo in the projection booth to beg him to let him watch a movie or even asked Alfredo if he could keep the piles of deleted scenes. Even though Toto and Alfredo's relationship started off tensely, they soon became really close to one another and Alfredo became a fatherly figure to Toto. Toto's biological father had gone to war and never came back. His constantly emotional mother would deny the fact that her husband would never return. She also sometimes displaced her anger onto poor Toto. Even though it was sad to see how Toto's mother treated him, I could understand that his mother was somehow in her defence mechanism phases as she was trying to avoid the anxiety resulted from her husband's death.

So maybe that was one the reasons why Toto became very attached to Alfredo, especially when Alfredo had agreed to spend time and to teach him how to operate the film projector. Their relationship, although was not biologically related, was very significant. Toto would even risk his own life to save Alfredo's in a fire. This gave me an insight in which humans do not have to be biologically related to one another to share such special secure attachment. Toto had developed such secure attachment with Alfredo through the many events that they have both been through. 

However, there was a sad part in the film about Alfredo. Initially when Toto wanted to be a projectionist, Alfredo opposed the idea. To him, being a projectionist was rather lonely. All he ever did was to watch the same film over and over again alone up in the projection booth. There was no one to talk to him at all until Toto showed up. This showed how vulnerable humans are and how every single one person seek to belong, as we are all social beings. 

After the fire, Alfredo had lost his eyesight and his job as a projectionist because the cinema was destroyed in the fire. During this part of the film, I was able to feel how upset the villagers were when the cinema was destroyed. I could still remember that someone in the film had mentioned that the cinema was the only entertainment the villagers had. After the war, life seemed so hard and to be able to have a slight entertainment in such a dull village was actually a blessing to them. It was also an interesting sight to see how the cinema had brought everyone together. It was funny to see how everyone in the cinema was so interactive with one another and how much they have enjoyed watching films, especially when the new cinema was opened and those previously censored scenes were no longer censored.

When the audiences conformed with one another as they laughed and cried together in the cinema, I came to a realization that it was so much fun to be like that - to be so collectivist rather than being so individualistic like how most of the people in our society are nowadays. When we were at the cinema nowadays, it was always very quiet because we all liked to enjoy the movie on our own. We didn't even like it when people were reacting loudly to the movie in our cinema. But come to think of it, if we could all be like the audiences in this film, would watching movies in cinema be more enjoyable than it already was?

So, as our Toto grew up to be a pretty good looking teenage boy, his love took a turning point in his life as he was no longer only loved films and Alfredo, he also fell in love with a beautiful young lady, Elena. However, Toto's love life in this film ended with much regret. This reminded me of a script told by a famous Chinese author and film director of the romantic movie, "You Are the Apple of My Eyes". He said that first loves may not always be our last one but they last forever in our memory and have a significant meaning in our life. This pretty much described Toto's first love, Elena. They had many wonderful and romantic memories that they shared with each other. But when Toto returned from his military service, he could no longer find Elena. I thought he would stand a chance with her by the end of the movie but I was wrong. As much as it did not feel good because of this regret, however, this sort of ending somehow wrapped up the film quite beautifully about first loves.

Devastated about Elena, Toto was sort of finding his meaning of life when Alfredo suggested that he should leave this small town to Rome. If Toto was to find his dreams and success, he must leave. The worst feeling was when Alfredo even asked Toto to never look back, to never come back and to forget every one of them. For this, I think I can understand why Alfredo did that. When I was in my first year, I felt homesick all the time when I had to leave home and I could not concentrate in my studies at first. When Alfredo told Toto to cut ties with all of them, maybe he was trying to make Toto leave everything he had behind and start anew because only then Toto would be able to start fresh and be who he wanted to be without having to think about home and have memories tortured him. It may have sounded harsh but he actually meant for Toto's own good. Anyhow, Alfredo had so many memories with Toto. When I watched this scene, I could feel that heaviness in both their hearts and only God knew that that was their last time seeing each other's faces.

Toto, or now known as Salvatore obeyed Alfredo's words and he never came back - which explained why he did not visit his mother for 30 years. My initial impression of him changed after watching this scene. However, he came back for Alfredo's funeral. Even though I was not Salvatore in the film, I felt deeply depressed and regret because for obeying Alfredo's last words, he was not able to visit Alfredo for so many years, after so much that he had done for him and now the only thing Salvatore was seeing was the coffin which held Alfredo's body.

Even so, one of the greatest moments in the film was when Salvatore met everyone else in town. He may not recognize each of them because they have all grown older but the nostalgic feeling when seeing everybody was there. He turned back and he saw Ciccio who gave him a job as projectionist after the rebuilt of the cinema. After so many years away, Toto was now back to where it all started, his home, with everyone whom he knew. Even though that day, the funeral had taken Alfredo away forever, it had given something back to Salvatore somehow. Salvatore was Toto once again.

The film gave me another heart breaking scene when Salvatore returned to Rome and watched the reel given by Alfredo. It was all those deleted kiss scenes that the priest had ordered to be cut out and which Toto had begged Alfredo for because he wanted to collect them but Alfredo refused to give it to him. Alfredo had spliced them all together for Toto. At this moment, it was as if the film had brought us all back to the beginning where it all started, when Toto was a mischievous young boy who annoyed Alfredo all the time. I believed that Salvatore was feeling exactly like how I was feeling because even though he got teary watching the short film, he smiled at the end and the film ended peacefully.