Cinema Paradiso: The New Version
Buena Vista Home Video, $29.99I’m loath to admit it, but sometimes the director doesn’t know best. The 1989 original cut won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, and was a sweetheart of a film to boot, about a young Sicilian boy named Salvatore who comes of age in the Fifties as a projectionist at his village’s theatre and later grows up to be a film director. The original was both an ode to the magic of movies and the moviehouse and a quiet elegy of first love lost, with the emphasis on the former, not the latter. The “new version” (apparently the one director Guiseppe Tornatore wanted all along) tacks on 51 more minutes — 51 minutes that go a long way toward undoing the charm of the original. The added footage mostly revolves around teenage Salvatore’s love affair with a local girl and the adult Salvatore’s reconnecting with her 30 years later. What was once wistful and melancholy now feels like forced melodrama, and the bottom-heaviness (the added hour mostly comes at the end) of the piece all but erases the beginning half’s endearing playfulness. Fortunately, the new version comes with the old version on the disc’s flipside (the only extra, beyond the trailer). Curiosity warrants a look at the new, but the romantic, largely optimistic 1989 original is what will keep you returning to the old.
This article appears in March 28 • 2003.
