(Italian Cinema Continued)
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso) 1988
Set in a small Sicilian village, the story depicts three stages in the life of Salvatore, who leaves his village on the advice of his mentor as a boy and returns home many years later as a prominent Roman movie director. He returns to attend the funeral of the town's former film projectionist (Philippe Noiret) and in so doing embarks upon a journey into his boyhood just after WW II when he became the unofficial son of the town projectionist. In the dark confines of the cramped theater, the townsfolk come to escape from the grim realities of post-war Italy while Salvatore learns most of what he'll ever learn about love, loss and loyalty from his beloved mentor and his nights spent at Cinema Paradiso.
La Meglio Gioventu (The Best of Youth) 2003
Spanning four decades, from the chaotic 1960s to the present, director Marco Tullio Giordana's passionate epic THE BEST OF YOUTH follows two Italian brothers through some of the most tumultuous events of recent Italian history. In a final period of hopeful innocence, free-spirited Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) travels the world and settles for a life as a successful psychiatrist, while his tragically introverted and idealist brother Matteo (Alessio Boni) joins the Italian police with the hope of righting society's wrongs. Their politics and personalities are inextricably intertwined as the world around them violently shifts and they are pushed together and pulled apart by the tides of history and their own divergent dreams.
Il Postino (The Postman) 1994
Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret), the famous Chilean poet, is exiled to a small island for political reasons. On the island, the unemployed son (Massimo Troisi) of a poor fisherman is hired as an extra postman due to the huge increase in mail that this causes. Il Postino is to hand-deliver the celebrity's mail to him. Though poorly educated, the postman learns to love poetry and eventually befriends Neruda. Struggling to grow and express himself more fully, he suddenly falls in love and needs Neruda's help and guidance more than ever.
Stanno Tutti Bene (Everybody's Fine) 1990
Matteo Scuro (Marcello Mastroianni) is a retired Sicilian railroad worker, a widower with five children, all of whom live on the mainland and hold responsible jobs. He decides to surprise each with a visit and finds none as he imagined. The film is a veritable travelogue across contemporary Italy, as Matteo journeys to Napoli, Roma, Firenze, Milano, and Turino to search for each of his children; he even spends one night on the streets among the homeless. Scuro returns to Sicily, visits his wife's grave, and reports with irony that "stanno tutti bene."