 Starring: Salvatore Cascio, Marco Leonardi, Philippe Noiret, Jacques Perrin
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Year Of Release: 1988
Plot: After being informed that his mentor Alfredo has died, a famous film director travels back to his home town and reminisces about his childhood. As a young boy Toto develops a passion for cinema and befriends the theatre’s projectionist, Alfredo, who becomes a father figure after his own dad is lost in battle. As he grows, Toto finds first love but Alfredo encourages him to leave the town and become a success. |
I’ve often wondered why film critics seem to have such a problem with sentimentality. It’s almost guaranteed that if any film is released which even vaguely deals with emotional issues such as love or nostalgia and which ends on a high note (or at least doesn’t deal almost exclusively with death ,pain and destruction), someone’s going to take it to town for being sentimental, as if this is inherently a bad thing.
However one film that managed to get past this was Cinema Paradiso. It is an insanely sentimental film, presenting a man’s idealised reminiscences of his childhood through rose-tinted glasses. Despite this it met almost universal acclaim on its international release, winning the Jury Prize at Cannes, and the Best Foreign Language Golden Globe, BAFTA and Oscar.
So why does this movie get away with being sentimental, but other films get roasted over the coals for it? One of the reasons is the subject. It’s about cinema and a young boy finding his passion for the flickering image. It’s a subject most people involved in film can empathise with and so rather than getting upset when a film sugar-coats it to the hilt, they love it because they can remember their own introduction to the wonders of motion pictures (for me it was Back To The Future). And that’s the thing with sentimentality, it only works if it actually makes you feel something and that relies on people being able to empathise with and recpetive to what you’re showing them. A film like Cinema Paradiso can be critically praised because it deals with a subject cineastes like, whereas most sentimental movie don’t. (It also doesn't hurt the film has the most amazing Ennio Morricone score).
I think there are also a few other reasons for critics' resistance to the sentimental. One of these is that many critics have lost touch with what’s ‘real’ in film and what isn’t. If you make a film about miserable people living miserable lives on a housing estate, you’ll get praised endlessly for your gritty realistic take on modern life. The problem with this is that most on the generally middle-class people writing the reviews don’t have a frigging clue what it’s like living on a housing estate. For all they know it could be carnival every day if you reside in a tower block, but their assumption is that everyone in council housing is either a druggie, a criminal, a pregnant teenager, or otherwise engaged in a downward spiral, and that to get a house in one of these areas, you have to sign a contract promising you’ll never do anything that’ll make you smile.
However, while these sorts of downbeat films do reflect real issues, they’re still talking about the exception rather than the rule and taking things to the extreme for dramatic effect. They’re trying to find some sort of ‘truth’, but they’re not doing that by showing you the average life of someone living in that situation, they’re finding particular exceptional stories that work as drama and that they think highlight social issues (after all, a genuinely accurate account of most people’s lives would be quite boring). The problem is that if you do the same about something positive, such as people falling in love, you’ll often get lambasted for being fake.
As Four Weddings and Notting Hill writer Richard Curtis has pointed out, he actually does nothing in his films that the purveyors of misery don’t, but because he uses the same tricks to highlight hope and happiness rather than misery and depression, he gets labelled sentimental and is dismissed. It’s a real shame that for some reason in film, miserable gets equated with ‘real’ and positivity is ‘fake’. It’s like people think everyone just runs around being terribly depressed all the time and nothing good ever happens. Isn’t life a bit sentimental sometimes? Don’t people find joy in falling in love (whether or not there are later problems), or remembering the happy times in their childhood?
They’ve even done studies of this, showing people short films, some of which told positive tales and some negative. The participants were then asked which they thought were based on true stories and which weren’t. The truth was they were all real-life tales, but the people taking part in the study overwhelmingly chose the negative shorts as being based on a true story. It does seem that when it comes to filmic fiction, we do treat bad things as somehow more real than the good in life. Yes terrible things happen and they should be reflected in film, but what’s wrong with being unabashedly positive once in a while?
This seems to be magnified in some critics, partially because I think some feel that’s how it’s meant to be and so they pretty much slot themselves into the idea that a miserable movie must be good and an unabashedly positive one is bad (in the same way that for some, indie=good, Hollywood=bad, no matter what the movie). These films also get absolutely ripped to shreds simply because the sort of people who write about films see an awful lot of them and therefore perhaps have more nuanced tastes than the average moviegoer. They feel the need to rip into films that are meant to make you feel simple happiness, because having watched a bazillion movies, they’re looking for a complexity and acknowledgment of the miserable side of life that the average viewer isn’t (it’s noticeable though that few critics ever have a go at a depressing film for not highlighting that sometimes people are actually happy).
It’s also true that most ‘sentimental’ films tend to be made with a female audience in mind, and most critics are men. The fact is, most films are made consciously or unconsciously to skew towards men, to such as extent that many male critics (and male audience members) don't even consider that a romantic, sentimental film might not have been made with them in mind, and so they criticise it in terms that suggests its crime was not to have been made just for them. Finally, I think a culture of cynicism has invaded film criticism, and so sentimentality automatically gets a ‘bah humbug’ response, unless it specifically talks to that particular critic, as it did with Cinema Paradiso.
Those involved in film do seem to have a bit of an attitude where they’re automatically dubious of seeing other people’s joy, while they’re more than willing to accept the misery. It’s like when someone wins an Oscar and they cry. Every time it happens there’s an immediate outpouring of people saying they didn’t like it and it was fake, as if it’s impossible to imagine that if you picked up the gong that was the pinnacle of your profession, after weeks of global scrutiny as a nominee, you might be a bit overcome with emotion. Instead cynicism kicks in and it’s labelled as OTT and fake. Likewise, if a film makes someone cry or get a lump in their throat, many reviewers seem to almost resent it. They spend much of their time decrying Hollywood for being vapid, but then get even more upset if a film is a bit moving, unless it's it's at least a little miserable.
Personally, I’m a bit of a sucker for a bit of well done sentimentality. Sometimes films over-egg it and what’s meant to pack an emotional punch ends up coming across as rather stupid, but much of the time if a film makes me feel something, no matter how cheesy it is, I reckon it must be doing something right (even if it's a little emotionally manipulative, at least it got you to feel something). Yes, some films cheat, such as Titanic, where you can almost feel James Cameron screaming ‘cry, goddamn you’ in your ear at the end of the movie, but I’d still prefer to genuinely feel something at the end of a movie rather leave the cinema merely satisfied that some moving images passed before my eyes.
I think what I’d like is a bit more balance in how critics react to movies. A film where people start out miserable and their lives get worse as thing go on, shouldn’t automatically be labelled good unless there’s an actual point to it (which is my major problem with Crash, which picked up the Best Picture Oscar because voters confused misery with quality). It’s also true that generally middle class film critics shouldn’t immediately leap on the ‘realism’ of a gritty movie if they don’t actually know whether it’s real or just seems like it. Likewise, just because a film is sentimental and wants people to feel good or get a lump in their throat, it shouldn’t automatically be labelled bad or false.
It also a problem that sentimental films aren’t really made for the sort of people who generally become critics, but if they could just open themselves up a bit more, they might find that they can not only enjoy sentimental films, but also experience the joy of leaving the theatre having actually been genuinely moved and made happy by what they’ve seen, even if it is all a bit silly. Surely that’s as good – and often a hell of a lot better – as films that make you feel like humanity is evil and you might as well give up on life now, especially as much of the time filmic misery isn’t any more genuinely ‘real’ than movie happiness, despite what many seem to want to believe.
TIM ISAAC
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