Movie Review

Directed by Giuseppi Torantore, starring: Phillipe Noret (Alberto) Salvatore Casca (Toto), Italian dubbed into English and French Winner Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, 121 minutes, 1988.

The story is told as a long flash back to the childhood of Salvatore (Toto) who is a young boy in a small town in Italy. His father is off to war, in fact is killed and he and his mother are active in the local parish. Toto is an acolyte. One day he discovers that one of the very important jobs of the parish priest is to censor the movies that are shown by Alberto at the town cinema. Scenes of kissing, termed pornography by the priest, are scrupulously excised from the movies. Toto is a curious kid and worms his way into the projection room and Alberto's heart though Alberto is, on the surface, quite gruff and scolding with the boy.

The film alludes to political undercurrents in Italian society between communists, the church and capitalism. A symbol of the opening up of the church and the benefits of socialism is that Alberto finds a way to project the movies onto the wall of a building in the town square so that everyone is able to watch. However, one night a fire breaks out in the projector that spreads to the whole theatre and while Toto runs in to save his Mentor, Alberto is burned and blinded. Toto becomes the projectionist.

We follow Toto through adolescence, first love, military service and a final confrontation with Alberto who exhorts, demands, orders him to leave town and not settle into the easy role of projectionist in the town. Throughout this time Alberto has offered Toto wise counsel at all the turning points in his development. Toto does go away and indeed does not come back for thirty years and then only for Alberto's funeral. In the mean time he has become a successful and well-known movie producer. Alberto's final gift is a canister of film; all the censored bits from all the films not approved by the priest. In some ways it is the missing bits from Toto's childhood

Even though the movie is self referencing (a film about a film projectionist showing films on his way to becoming a film maker) it is a delightful story about human development and a metaphor of the changes in the church and in faith in the 20th C. As the movies become more explicit and the audience more raucous it reflects the changes from Modernist to Post Modernist values.

In a study called "Faith Development and the Adult Life Cycle" one of the significant and most intriguing findings was that the critical, even determinate, issue in the development of faith, i.e. in moving from childish faith to mature adult faith is leaving home (physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually).

Alberto is a Christ Figure who forces the boy who is like a son to him to leave and not come back. Harsh? Well, how hard has it been for any of us to leave and not go back to fundamentalism, sexism, patriarchy, codependence, hierarchy, you name it? Here is a delightful and funny film that invites reflection on those mentors in our lives who have invited, demanded and compelled us to move on from the comfortable cinema paradisos in which we would have been pleased to settle.