Little Italy: Paradiso came to Karachi

It is a remarkable film set in a provincial town in Sicily after the end of the Second World War.

KARACHI:

Cinema Paradiso, the Franco-Italian film that was screened at the Alliance Francaise on November 20, was strictly not part of the Italian festival that was held in the city. But, as the popular head of the Italian mission in Karachi, Roberto Franceschinis, said at the function, it could be regarded as a fitting finale to the efforts he and his charming wife Julianna have made to display vignettes of Italian culture in Pakistan.

Paradiso is a truly remarkable film. Set in a provincial town in Sicily after the end of the Second World War its theme and subject matter are timeless and relative to each successive generation. It is, in fact, cinema’s greatest ode to motion pictures. It might not be the greatest Italian film I have seen but it is certainly the most memorable.

In between scenes of drama, unrequited love, intrigue and thwarted ambition there are lots of flashbacks, drenched with nostalgia and wistfulness that took me back to the age of Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rosselini, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne, Marcel Pagnol and Rene Clair, who tossed up masterpiece after masterpiece.



One of the brief vignettes that captured the interest of the audience and held it for a good 30 seconds was the 1949 classic Bitter Rice, which was written by seven different script writers and directed by Giuseppe De Santis. It starred the most beautiful film star ever to have emerged from the land of eternal sunshine - Sylvana Mangano. The baión - a type of rhythm that originated in Brazil - to which she danced went round the world like a tornado and created waves in Brazil the home of the samba.

In 1952, I visited Genoa where they were screening Riso Amaro, the most imaginative Italian movie of the day, which tapped into a variety of moods, storylines and genres and still remained coherent. I remember meeting an old man who told me that Sylvana Mangano was not born on earth but had actually risen from the sea and was Jupiter’s gift to the world. I nodded in agreement. The old man had a point.

It’s been quite some time since the Americans and the British have screened some of their classics, such as The Grapes of Wrath and Twelve Angry Men (the Henry Fonda version) and Room at the Top and The Browning Version. The vacuum is, nevertheless, being filled by the Germans and the French, who are conducting the European Cinema Weekend at the Goethe Institut and the Alliance Francaisé de Karachi.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th, 2013.