Cinema Paradiso: The New Version Buena Vista Home Video, 2003   Reviewed by Tony Buchsbaum	At the finale of Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark is a brief scene in which the Ark of the Covenant is stored in a wooden box, labeled with a meaningless government serial number, and wheeled to an obscure spot in a vast warehouse filled with countless other wooden, numbered boxes. The point, of course, is that the government is going to keep the Ark safe by, in effect, losing it in this room. They won't be able to find it, but neither will the enemy. But that's not the scene's only point. The other point is that Spielberg wanted to pay homage to a similar scene in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. This sort of nod happens quite a lot in moviemaking. The placement of the camera, the lighting of a scene, the dialogue, a moment of action, even the execution of a scene, as in the Raiders/Kane example. There are many ways for a director to pay a tribute to a film or filmmaker who inspired him, which is to say there are many ways filmmakers can pay a tribute to moviemaking. This is one of the reasons movies are an accumulative art, as one's moviegoing experiences accrete in the psyche and are then used to create further experiences. Of course, editors might argue that filmmaking is anything but accumulative, in that they spend endless hours snipping film to find the movie inside the footage. It's these very snips that form the heart of the 1988 Italian film Cinema Paradiso, director Giuseppe Tornatore's tale of a small-town movie theater projectionist and the young boy who befriends him. Upon its release, Paradiso was hailed as a revelation, an inspired piece of moviemaking. It appeared on Ten Best lists, it received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and it won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. It is also, by design, not a film about the joys of moviemaking, but one about the joys of movie-watching. It's this key difference that makes it accessible to everyone who sees it, because, to be honest, few us actually get to make movies that pay tributes to other movies we love. Cinema Paradiso takes place in a small town in Italy during the years after World War II. The one movie theater in the town is overseen by the cantankerous projectionist, Alfredo -- played by Philippe Noiret -- who sits in his small room, making sure the celluloid spools properly and doesn't catch fire. Alfredo is also responsible for snipping from the films he shows moments deemed too racy by the church. Kissing. Brief nudity. Any outward display of passion. These are all excised, and the film is spliced back together. The audiences hardly notice the cuts. They are too in love with the whole moviegoing experience to let these edits stand in their way. For them, the theater screen is a window to the ultimate escape from life in their small, provincial town. Movies not only fuel their fantasies, they fulfill them. They lose themselves in the stories, in the music, in the emotional highs and lows that movies provide. There is one boy, though, Salvatore -- nicknamed Toto -- who seems to care little for the stories. Instead, he is captivated by the smoky tongue of light that shoots from the mouth of a lion's head sculpture on the wall at the back of the theater; it's through the lion's mouth that the films are projected. More than anything, Toto wants to peek behind the curtain, as it were, much like his namesake in The Wizard of Oz, and when he pulls it back, he finds Alfredo and the projector. Thus begins Toto's love for moviemaking. Alfredo and Toto, who is played to full saucer-eyed effect by Salvatore Cascio, build at first a tentative, then friendly, then father-son relationship. Alfredo teaches Toto how to work the projector, and Toto teaches the lonely Alfredo what it's like to have a trusted companion, even a child. When Toto becomes a teenager (played at this stage by the dark, handsome Marco Leonardi), he falls in love, and when his love is sent away, he enlists in the army. Many years later, Toto (now played by Jacques Perrin) becomes a famous film director, living a very Hollywood-like life in Rome, having channeled his love for moviemaking into a profession. It's here that Cinema Paradiso finds its raison d'être. The film centers on the adult Toto's discovery that his beloved Cinema Paradiso has been torn down to make way for a parking lot. During his flight home, he remembers his childhood, Alfredo, and the mix of personalities of the town. Once home, he finds that nothing is the same. Alfredo has died -- and, in many ways, so has Toto's soul. His childhood is a distant time he sorely misses and needs. He has lived his life under the shadow of the girl he loved as a teenager. And now all he has is a package left to him by Alfredo. It turns out to be a reel of film, which Toto cues up in an empty screening room back home. As he watches the screen, Alfredo's work unspools before him: a montage made of all the hundreds of snippets cut from all those movies, all those years ago. Couples flirting, kissing, brief glimpses of topless women, passionate embraces. Though these are pieces Toto did not see as a boy, they represent the movies he did see. They also bring back to him countless memories of that long lost girl, his first love, in which he discovered all the intricacies of young passion and innocent kisses and tentative fumblings. In short, the montage, as a representation of the emotional landscape of his boyhood, returns his soul to him. At this moment, with Ennio Morricone's score surging behind it, the screening room truly becomes the adult Toto's cinema paradiso. Actor Jacques Perrin's face becomes a living canvas as wonder, awe and devastating sorrow flash across them in turn. Without a single word of dialogue, we understand that while as a filmmaker, Toto has lived a life of the imagination, the imagination hasn't been his own. He's reminded that even though he became a filmmaker because he was fascinated by the process, there is a great emotion to movies. They stirred the townspeople decades before and now, perhaps for the first time in his life, they stir Toto as well. It's a life-altering revelation; even as a director, Toto has never clearly understood the power of the moving image. What he understood as a process he now understands as a powerful emotional generator. The montage works on another level, too. It reminds us -- brutally in its way, unforgivingly -- what we all go to the movies for. The clips themselves remind us of great movies of the past, some of the classic films of that time, and we are reminded, like Toto, that these images we share publicly are as much a part of our lives as the ones we keep private. It's a testament to Tornatore's skill as a filmmaker that he has literally transposed the audience: for the bulk of the film, we were the townspeople, drawn to the flickering images in the dark, and now we are Toto, awed by the poetry of the montage and by the devastating wallop that even these brief snippets of film can pack. After an initial DVD release that featured just the film itself, the new DVD -- Cinema Paradiso: The New Version -- offers much more. In fact, close to an hour more, in an extended version of the film. The new footage augments the story of the girl Toto fell in love with and their subsequent reunion, an event which is not in the original film. (The new DVD contains both versions, as well as a theatrical trailer.) Whether you care more for the extended version or the original, Cinema Paradiso is worth watching simply because it's a movie that celebrates the joy of watching movies. In a time when the technical is emphasized over character, when how a movie is made sometimes overshadows what the movie's about, this movie is an experience that reminds you why movies are as spellbinding as they are, simply by offering a story in which the most special effect is the story itself. | May 2003   Tony Buchsbaum is the author of Total Eclipse. At night he works on another novel and a screenplay. Days, he writes advertising copy in Lawrenceville, NJ, where he lives with his wife and sons.	It is also, by design, not a film about the joys of moviemaking, but one about the joys of movie-watching. It's this key difference that makes it accessible to everyone who sees it, because, to be honest, few us actually get to make movies that pay tributes to other movies we love.