".... talking Italian..." (but no Robert de Niro waiting)
I started studying Italian at university a year or two after Cinema Paradiso came out.

I'd never seen it, but luckily, one of my flatmates had the video, so it got a lot of use that year and as my Italian got better, I thought I pretty much understood what was being said and congratulated myself on becoming good enough at the language that I could follow everything going on in the film.

Or so I thought; as they say, pride comes before a fall.

A few months later, we found out that one of the cinemas in town was showing it as a Sunday matinee, so a few of us decided to pop down and watch it on the big screen. There were four of us, and we were all had a pretty good command of Italian compared to the rest of our year, so we were looking forward to sitting back, ignoring the subtitles and just enjoy it.

When we got to the cinema, most of Cardiff's Italian community must have been there. Plus a load who'd made the trip from Swansea, Merthyr, Newport, you name it, the older ones all done up in Sunday best.

So the film starts, and of course because the four of us had all seen it before, we knew which bits to laugh at, etc. Except it turned out we didn't.

You'd have a bit of the movie where something was (or wasn't) happening, with or without dialogue, and suddenly all the older Welsh/Italians (but not the younger ones) would start pissing themselves laughing.

This happened a good few times during the film, and to this day, I have no idea what they were getting out of it that we weren't. And on my year out, watching the movie on TV with my (Italian) flatmates, they didn't seem to be reacting the same way that the aged Italians back in Cardiff had.

And it wasn't the jokes about how people in Sicily viewed those from Naples as Northerners, nor the father dragging his son to school because otherwise "you'll never get into the Carabinieri" (reinforcing a stereotype about the number of Sicilians who serve in it); no, this was something much more subtle that was making them have hysterics.

Fifteen years on, Cinema Paradiso remains one of my favourite films, and I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it.

But I'm still mystified about what they found so funny during the film at that screening in Cardiff. I'm sure there was some kind of Welsh - Italian conspiracy going on...
(Capo, Mon 21 Jul 2008, 16:24, 2 replies)

You wanna try
Get Carter when they put it on in Newcastle.

Always a full house, mainly old folks who remember when it was filmed.

It has something to do with the fact that they remember it in some other context - like shagging
fleecing the cast film crew.
( buffet_the_appetite_slayer ٩(●̮̃•)۶ jacked in to the ICE on, Mon 21 Jul 2008, 16:51, closed)

I did Italian at uni too
and I'm ashamed to say I've never seen Cinema Paradiso. We had to watch a lot of Neorealist films that made you want to kill yourself.
( Maladicta, Mon 21 Jul 2008, 23:38, closed)