We Can’t Move Forward Without Change (Cinema Paradiso)

Cinema Paradiso is a story of a boy named Toto (played alternately by Jacques Perrin as the adult, Salvatore Cascio as the child, and Marco Leonardi as the adolescent) who was the only child star strucked with the ‘art’ of projectioning the film. Though he is also very fond of watching films, like most of the adults in Giancaldo, Sicily in postwar Spain. There he found his true love, the film, and his best friend, Alfredo (Philippe Noiret) where he learns a lot in life from both. But falling in love was the only thing he did not learn from them. He fell in love with Elena (Agnese Nano). And the twist started there.

            Elena’s family does not approve on Toto for their daughter and it was a me-against-the-world relationship. They were separated by faith and by some ‘evil witches’ and for this time, it was Alfredo for an unknown reason. Their lives were change carrying such heartbreak. Alfredo made Toto promise to never come back to Giancaldo and let other people talk about his works. And so he did. He was a director. But the unfolding mysteries were opened in the end part.

            The film’s style is flashbacking. And the film talks about changes. People change as well as their priorities. And just like the idea and discoveries of these people, a day-today process of living changes. Before, the films use catches fire but now it won’t. Before, people value watching films in motion picture that they surely feels the movie but now it is just for entertainment and the message the film would want to deliver is really not that important. And before, the church decides which scene to delete and which scene to show and such obscenity is absolute. But now, obscenity is a case to case basis depending on the MTRCB.

            But the end of the story talks about what matters at the end of the day. The faces of those people who was part Toto’s life in reaching where he was, was shown. Alfredo, the most influential of all into him, unfolded his feeling for Toto as a son. Though he happens to find Elena, everything is different now, as she said. Indeed it was. The cut love story ended with acceptance that there could never be another chapter.

            And while Toto was watching the compiled film strips he have always been wanting to have from Alfredo, he then could have realized what Alfredo would want him to say and could be felt and be seen in every film-watching experience: He can always indulge in nostalgia, but trying to keep the past alive is fruitless.