A Priest of the Movie Faith

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CINEMA PARADISO Directed and Written by Giuseppe Tornatore

Alone in the theater, Father Adelfio (Leopoldo Trieste), the little Sicilian town's ex officio movie censor, rings a bell whenever anything on the screen strikes him as salacious. Up in the booth, Alfredo, the projectionist (Philippe Noiret, who is becoming Spencer Tracy to our age), slaps a piece of paper into the reel marking the spot the priest has X-rated. The walls of Alfredo's aerie are festooned with ribbons of film he has cut from movies before showing them to the public, for the good father sees in even the most chaste movie kiss an occasion for sin.

Secretly watching these censorious rites, though not entirely comprehending them, is a little boy named Toto (played by a delightful discovery, Salvatore Cascio). For him, any moving image is the nearest available occasion for bliss. An indifferent altar boy to the priest, he is a passionate acolyte to the projectionist, who is quite literally the keeper of a flame (the arc lamps inside his machine), the cranky guardian of a mystery more awesome -- or at least more attractive -- to the child than anything the church has to offer.

In this alternative religion, Toto will rise from novice (as the projectionist's assistant) to parish priest (he takes over when Alfredo is blinded in a nitrate-film fire) to bishop (he becomes a director). But it is one of the many graces of Cinema Paradiso that it is content merely to observe the analogies between two faiths, not point up the conflict between them. Writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore's manner is gently reflective, not satirical. His largest aim, and greatest success, is to re-create the lost spirit of a vanished movie era: the late 1940s and early '50s.

In that period, before television converted moving images into visual tranquilizers -- pain and time killers sold over the airwaves without prescription (or proscription) -- they were stimulants to heroic-romantic imaginings. Self-transcendence, if you will. The movies were especially potent in the way they worked on the deprived sensibilities of provincial youngsters. Sneaking out from under parental disapproval, sheltering in the dark under the big, glowing screen, innocently absorbing its fantastic representations of faraway realities, surrendering to the belief that those realities must be true (unendurable to think that the whole world was as constricted as one little corner of Sicily was), Toto comes close to becoming a generational archetype, transcending the particulars of his own situation.

But if he is seen with a certain sentiment, he is seen with a certain bracing irony too. When he achieves adolescence (and is played at this stage of his life by the appealing Marco Leonardi), he conducts his first and, as it turns out, only great love affair with the remote Elena (Agnese Nano) as if it were an old-fashioned movie romance, something like one of those doomy weepers Garbo used to do. Poor Toto. In this realm he has only screen conventions to guide him.

He is much luckier when it comes to work. For there, as the film makes clear in its coda, the example of Alfredo is ever before him. Maybe the old man's business was projecting dreams, but the work was hard, hot, technically fussy and, as the misadventure with the explosive nitrate film proves, dangerous. It was essential for Alfredo to keep his wits, and his skepticism, about him. In other words, to remain open to fantasies but not be consumed by them. These are good lessons for a would-be director. They are good lessons for everybody. And no recent movie has taught them with more patient sweetness.