Part of the Picture: The Princess and the Pauper
THE PRINCESS AND THE PAUPER
JUNE 21, 2008 - GIUSEPPE TORNATORE’S STOUTLY SENTIMENTAL CINEMA PARADISO is a love story made up of three individual love stories. It is, first and foremost, a valentine to the communal movie-going experience; its characters may uniformly declaim in Italian, but the unspoken language that unites them is that of the moving image. The second love story unfolds between the childless Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), the projectionist at the local movie hall, and the fatherless Salvatore (Marco Leonardi); each finds in the other a missing unit of family to complete the picture. And thirdly, there’s Salvatore’s love, unrequited at first, for the beautiful, wealthy Elena (Agnese Nano), who likes him, but not quite in that way.
Salvatore apologises to Elena, referring to an earlier phone call where he had burst into foolhardy romantic declarations without realising it was her mother on the line. “You’re so beautiful, Elena,” he professes. “When we meet, I can’t say anything right because you make me tremble.” Elena smiles, evidently flattered, but her subsequent words are those no heart in love wants to hear. “Salvatore, you’re very sweet, and I like you very much… but I don’t love you.” But instead of collapsing in dejection, Salvatore replies that he doesn’t care, that he’ll wait until she falls in love with him. “Now listen. Every night, after work, I’ll come stand outside your house. And I’ll wait. Every night. When you change your mind, open your window. That’s all. I’ll understand.”
Salvatore isn’t being ridiculous. He’s merely following the example of the soldier from the story Alfredo told him earlier, while seated in a doorway positioned beautifully at the centre of the frame, as rugged expanses of limestone walls bled into the corners. “Once upon a time, a king gave a feast for the loveliest princesses in the realm. Now, a soldier who was standing guard saw the king’s daughter go by. She was the most beautiful of all and he instantly fell in love. But what is a simple soldier next to the daughter of a king? Well, at last he succeeded in meeting her and told her he could no longer live without her.”
“The princess was so taken by the depth of his feeling that she said to the soldier, ‘If you can wait for 100 days and 100 nights under my balcony, at the end I shall be yours.’ With that, the soldier went and waited one day, two days, then ten, then twenty. Each evening, the princess looked out and he never moved! In rain, in wind, in snow, he was always there. Birds shit on his head, bees stung him, but he didn’t budge. At the end of 90 nights, he had become all dry, all white. Tears streamed from his eyes. He couldn’t hold them back. He didn’t even have the strength to sleep. All that time, the princess watched him. At long last, it was the 99th night, and the soldier stood up, took his chair and left.”
Salvatore, listless at first about what seemed to be an old man’s ramblings, has by now been drawn into the story that so resembles his own. “What? After all that?” he interjects. “After all that,” Alfredo affirms. “And don’t ask what it means. I don’t know. If you understand it, you tell me.” Salvatore, subsequently, takes to waiting outside Elena’s window, night after night, crossing out dates on his calendar, through rain and thunder and lightning, through a New Year’s eve that instills the spirit of celebration in every heart but his – and just when he’s had enough, just as he rips up the calendar that appears to mock his foolish perseverance, he hears his name being called out.
It is Elena, who says she loves him, but who is eventually unable to stand up to a father who speaks of marrying her off to a business associate’s son. Salvatore’s brief summer of love turns into a lifelong winter of discontent – he never ever marries – and, looking back, he realises why Alberto’s story ended the way it did. He tells his older friend, his father-figure, “Now I know why the soldier left after all that time. One more night and the princess would be his. But she might have broken her promise, and that would have been terrible. It would have killed him. This way, at least, for 99 nights he had lived with the illusion that she was waiting for him.”
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I saw this movie in my midteens and I remember how powerfully it affected me. And in an odd sort of parallel, it was also the only time I ever saw it - just in case I’d grown up into a person who couldnt appreciate it with the kind of intensity that lived in my 14 yr old self. I didn’t want to ruin it.
The president ( it seems I was pretty much unopposed) will take your Cinema Paradiso bait
. Salvatore lives in a world where his moral centre was influenced by the movies he saw. I think more than Alfredo its the movies and their fairy tale endings that influenced him. Unfortunately much like the title of that 1994 Ben Stiller movie - Reality Bites.
I felt an instant connection to Salvatore. Growing up I had an insatiable thirst for the movies and a mother who wasn’t too proud of my predilections. “Poi Padikkura velaya paaruda” permuted in various languages was a common “vaasagam” at home. For a short while however, probably till the end of middle school, my notions of life and romance were still informed by cinema, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone. I was just one of the “cinema paarthu valarntha balageenamana koottam” referenced in Kuruthippunal.
Much later in the light of day that adulthood provided (I loathe the word maturity) I wondered why we hadn’t seen a movie like CP in our movie obsessed subcontinent. And then, almost as if he read my thoughts, in 2006 Vasanthabalan makes Veyyil. That shot of Murugesan fine combing his mustache (almost an homage to Rajni’s barber from Johnny) is when I fell in love with that movie. While the movie deals with a lot of issues - Murugesan’ duality of nature due to faulty parenting(Jeyamohan who is working with Vasanthabalan in Angadi Theru writes a wonderful column about this in his Tamil Blog) and such - what really stayed with me is how Murugesan cant handle the disconnect with reality. He even resorts to alcoholism, much like the 70’s and 80’s matinee hero who can’t handle the burden of unrequited love. Veyyil richly deserves the award it just received.
Amrita, gee you took the words outta my mouth
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this was probably one of the very 1st movies I saw on star movies when we first installed cable tv and I remember watching it awestruck…(but also switching to ninaithaale inikkum on sun tv during the commercial breaks that came on)….and I’ve wondered why I never saw it again…thanks for this piece BR..it brought back some fond memories…:)
I think its about time I saw it again !
Amrita: It’s still a powerful emotional experience — but only if the intervening years haven’t thickened your hide about sentimental moviemaking.
Deepauk M: Yeah, Veyil didn’t work for me as a whole. But the projection-booth bit between Murugesan and Thangam was a gem. Been hearing good things about Angadi Theru, by the way. Let’s see..
Arun: And I had it taped from Star Movies too
LOL about switching to NI during breaks. Speaking of Kamal and his disco days, I caught one of my favourite songs of his recently on TV: Unnai naan paarthathu… Sripriya, Vidhubala… Man, it was more nostalgia than Salvatore ever handled 
No review for Dashaavatharam yet? Or did I miss it?
In the US, the tickets cost $16 - twice as much as the normal ticket cost. I guess we’ll end up waiting for the DVD version.
brangan: Fancy having this beautiful coming-of-age piece come our way today — June 20 being the first day of summer here (as announced by the will-morph-as-occasion-demands Google logo) — not-to-mention its Winter of Our Discontent connection. Thank you for giving us Californians a reason to smile (I can almost see Mr.President nodding away over there in LA).
Amrita: Not to leave the East Coast folks out, but hey, you’re the one that got to see it at 14! I’m jealous. But given that something like this keeps coming my way once every 5 years or so to rip my hide raw, I still feel 14, sensitivity-to-sentimental-moviemaking-wise.
And the masochist that I’m, I can’t wait to check out CP, if only to envy Salvatore the burden he was blessed to bear…
Deepauk M: As if being president (unopposed and all) weren’t enough, you compete for the organization’s outstanding contributor award by reminding us of that Big Mountain song? How much greedier can you get?
The song swept me right back to my first year in college…Listening to it now, 13 years later, I’m amazed at how undiminished its charm is…such a cushion of comfort. Love it.
Lakshmi: You didn’t miss *anything*, let me assure you
Sagarika: You’re welcome.
you article was like reliving this movie experience again…it is one of those films that really moved me while i was watching it….it is stunningly beautiful….
by the way, where is the “dashaavatharam” review?
WOW!! That was my first reaction when I saw your post in this article…Read through the article with great expectations.. U let me down..No word about Ennio Moricone’s amazing music :(.. I cannot think about the movie without the titillating background strains which still resonate in my brain..!! I was expecting u to recreate that magic in ur words (only u cud do that!!!) when music transforms the movie to a different plane altogether!!!
Arijit: Thanks.
Ram Kumar: One of the nice things about doing this Part of the Picture column is that I don’t have to be comprehensive and all review-like and talk about every single thing… It’s just a “part” of the picture that’s here. But I agree that the movie would be unthinkable without Morricone’s score (written with hs son Andrea, by the way), as is almost any movie with Morricone’s score. Try watching Once Upon a Time in the West on mute
My views are partly in line with with Amrita has said above. I watched Cinema Paradiso for the first time over a decade ago when my movie interest was blossoming. The movie blew me away. The nostalgia was too sweet to resist, it had one of my favourite actors - Philippe Noiret and some great score byy Morricone.
I had a chance to see it again 3 years back on DVD. A director’s edition. One suggestion - see a director’s edition only using some discretion. The Cinema Paradiso director’s edition has a wholly unnecessary 30 minute long track on the kid coming back to his hometown and searching for his childhood sweetheart, finding that she is married etc etc. It was absolute tedium.
So i am quite unsure if my slight downgrade of the movie is due to ageing or due to the horrible director’s edition i saw.
On my statement above on Directors’ editions, i reached that view after some horrible experiences with Abyss and Apocalypse Now, Redux. I do believe in the idea of studios reining in directors. A recent Sight and Sound had a nice article on how Daryl Zanuck reined in John Ford and Ford made his best movies under Zanuck.
Vamshi: I’d say the director’s cut of this and Redux are different films altogether. Like you, I too prefer the “theatrical versions” — but once you remove considerations of which is the better movie, there’s a lot of stuff to savour in the extended versions.
With CP, I especially liked the revelation about Alfredo’s manipulations, though (as you said) the love story was a bit tedious. It was touching to see how much Alfredo was invested in the kid, and this revelation also set up an interesting layer to the subtext about “to gain something, you need to lose something” which was in the earlier version too.
As for Ford, two of his greatest films — and later films — Searchers and Liberty Valance, weren’t with Zanuck. Nice anecdote though. Is there a link? Thanks.
I might have a scan copy of that. Let me check. Will upload and drop a link.