Benediction

The Italian film industry has sadly declined from the time when Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief won a special Oscar as Best Foreign Film in 1949 to this year's tepid nominee for Best Picture -- that Forrest Gump Italian-style knockoff, Il postino. One sign of hope is Giuseppe Tornatore's epic, bleak, rousingly comic The Star Maker. Since winning an Oscar in 1989 for his alternately inspired and treacly, visionary and trite Cinema Paradiso, Tornatore seems to have turned away from the influences of Hollywood pablum to the rich resources of his own cinematic and cultural heritage: Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni, and ultimately Dante Alighieri.

Despite occasional lapses into melodrama, bathos, and broad humor, The Star Maker bears comparison to, yes, even Dante. It's a tale of cynicism and redemption spanning the depths of hell and the glimmers of paradise, a profoundly moving spiritual and artistic journey originating in the basest humanity and destined for the divine.

One way to approach the greatness of the masters of Italian neo-realism is to set the film at the time of their initial glory. It's 1953, and itinerant conman Joe Morelli (Sergio Castellitto, who brings a Jean-Paul Belmondo panache to the lupine looks of a John Turturro) is out to exploit the burgeoning glamor of his country's film industry by selling the dream of fame, fortune, and meaning to the benighted poor of a Sicily struggling with the postwar recovery. Traveling from village to village in a battered van stucco'd with movie posters and filled with anachronistic equipment and worthless film, he summons the inhabitants of each battered hamlet with Mussolini-like oratory, promising a trip to Cinecittà studios in Rome and movie stardom to those who'll pay him 1500 lire for a bogus screen test. Although he offers his clients scripts with lines from Gone with the Wind for their auditions, most are illiterate and end up baring their soul to Joe's non-recording lens.

Had Tornatore chosen to go the sentimental route of Paradiso and Il postino -- what Pauline Kael has described as the cute-child-and-clean-old-peasant style of foreign filmmaking -- the result would have first manifested itself in these montages of simple people expressing their deepest desires, dreads, and memories. Instead of goopy clichés, however, he offers us detailed portraits of human absurdity, frailty, and strength seen from the point of view of the callous and mercenary Joe. The confessions of these forgotten souls -- ranging from a pregnant teenage girl to a centenarian veteran of Garibaldi's army -- waver unsettlingly from tragedy to black humor, one's empathy darkened and detached by Joe's condescension and cynicism.

So when Joe is at last seduced by people he plunders, the conversion is convincing and devastating. It's also sexy and ethereal, taking the form of nubile and angelic Beata (Tiziana Lodato), an orphan working in a convent determined to escape her poverty through the illusion of cinema. She also falls in love with Joe, and as much as the con man tries to shake off this latter-day Beatrice she clings him, opening up his eyes to the beauty and humanity of the world he's pretending to film.

As photographed by Dante Spinotti and conceived by Tornatore's eye for the sublime and surreal image (flawed as Paradiso was, some of its visuals were astounding -- take the scene in which the movie theater bursts into an inferno, for example), the Sicilian landscape is as mysterious and alive as its people. Suffused with light and alive with deities, it's an ancient pagan dream and the raw stuff of the imagination. Some sequences are mini-poems, as when Joe's van negotiates around carnival-like political demonstrations, or is stopped by a policeman who recites Inferno in front of an ancient amphitheater -- or when he's summoned by local mafiosi to record the services for their dead don.

These last two encounters set Joe up for his downfall and salvation. Like Paradiso, The Star Maker ends with a montage of recovered images; in this case, though, they are recorded not on celluloid but on the soul. A stunning document of the triumph of art and love over history and greed, Tornatore's new film offers hope that his country's film industry is capable of a new renaissance, that it can turn its eyes from the saccharine to the stars.

Click to read an interview with Giuseppe Tornatore.