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As the first shots opened vistas of a marshy countryside through which a travelling cinema clatters down long roads, and nipped close in to the drivers to catch some easy banter as they rode along, I thought, '"Cinema Paradiso" eat your heart out'. The nostalgia was already evident, so was the old cinema which was going to carry it; but there was a refreshingly misty tone and an easy movement which promised an narrator with a lighter touch and a broader mind and more space for the subject to exist. It was a vain hope, alas, but for a while it was sustained. The silent cinema sessions that Giovanni and Tonino set up in farm courtyards are reconstructed with loving, and surely convincing, detail: they have the spirit and the energy and of course the footage, and incidentally they answered a question I was asking myself only last week.(Sure enough, at least in these mobile screenings, the presenter does supply narration and therefore nobody has to read the subtitles.) So far so good so long as there's no need for a story. But as soon as there is, everything becomes devastatingly predictable: predictable in the sense that you can tell from first sight of a character who they are, what their politics are, and how they'll end up. The young Fascist is tall and blonde and Aryan and glares; the older Fascist is dark and jowly and wears a Savile Row suit; the ambivalently Fascist femme fatale has perfectly permed hair and Hollywood lipstick and a wasp-waisted summer dress; the communists have (very) fine eyes. None of which is per se unlikely, but when the descriptions serve just as well the other way round (very fine eyes = communist, wasp-waisted dress = collaborator, etc.), then there's a problem. The problem extends from characterisation to narrative: it's written in the formulae from the outset just which dilemmas Giovanni and Tonino will be faced with and just how they'll respond to them. No surprises, then, and some more substantial disappointments; there's a homosexual uncle in the wealthy family, written to be sympathetic (and at least not visually stereotyped), but whose function, apart from being extraordinarily cultured and knowledgeable about cinema, is to commit sacrificial suicide after writing a note to his beloved niece calling her his 'only tenderness'. Oh? At the end of all this I should say that my judgement's got harsher since I saw it. Free movement and engagement with place and with cinema survive throughout, and its heart is generous; its real problem is to be, like its hero, naive about the telling of stories. I was sorry to happen upon the 'Cahiers' review of it, which was merciless slaughter; apart from being too well-disposed to Mingozzi to be happy about seeing him panned, I thought the film was clearly defensible. But, at the same time, I couldn't avoid admitting that 'Cahiers' had a point; and from an ex-documentarist stereotypes are doubly disappointing. MIXED/NO, finally.
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