MOVIE REVIEW : Life, Art Blend in ‘Cinema Paradiso’ : Oscar winner: Nostalgic Italian film tells of a youngster’s love affair with the movies and how it shaped his adult life.

The cinema, Jean Cocteau once said, is the only art form that shows death at work--and death, time and our love for films are the subjects of Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” (at the Cove Theater in La Jolla).

It’s a shining valentine to the movies--full of homages, collages and swooningly romantic Ennio Morricone music--and it gets right at the messy, impure, wondrous way they capture and enrapture us. It’s a film about why people love movies, how they can both break our hearts and lift them up again.

Winner of the Oscar for best foreign-language film, “Cinema Paradiso” is set mostly in a small Sicilian fishing village in the ‘40s and ‘50s, recalled by a man journeying back for the funeral of an old friend. It’s an almost unabashedly sentimental film. But, in a way, that fits. Movies, in general, are a crowd-pleasing, impure art, and the movies we see here--though sometimes great classics--are messily and happily involved with the day-to-day lives of the people who watch them.

For all its dramatic flaws, “Cinema” becomes a cascade of wonders on the screen, enlivened by its great central image: the wonderful old Paradiso theater, a cross between a village church and a sleazy bijou, set in a Sicilian village square. The film follows two lives dominated by the Paradiso: the child, Salvatore Di Vitta, whose obsession leads to adult vocation as a film director, and his mentor and paterfamilias, Alfredo, the Paradiso’s Rabelaisian projectionist (Philippe Noiret).

Young Salvatore, nicknamed Toto, is played with brio and ebullience by an 8-year-old Sicilian, Salvatore Cascio: a flashing-eyed imp with an entrancing smile and a sneaky streak. The teen-age Salvatore (Marco Leonardi) is a petulant juvenile who spends much of his time mooning over a young girl of “superior” social class, whose image he first catches in a movie camera. The elder Salvatore (played by Jacques Perrin, once the charming juvenile of “The Sleeping Car Murders” and “Z”) is a gray-haired urban sophisticate, a bed-hopping bachelor who has, apparently, avoided his town and mother for 30 years, though Rome is only an hour away by plane.

While the movies open up the world for Salvatore, they close it down for Alfredo. They seal him up in a hot, tiny, dangerous cubicle where he is condemned to watch the same images over and over, talking with phantoms; where he must--under the prudish dictates of the local priest--snip out every kissing scene from every film.

In an accident, the movies actually turn on him, blinding him when the nitrate ignites and burns down the theater, ironically at a moment when Toto’s namesake, the great Italian clown, is cavorting on film. When Alfredo loses the movies, he has only Toto--who becomes his successor, the new projectionist--and his memories. And the movies, and the lure of the city, take Toto from him too.

In a way, the older Salvatore is a man shaped by the new cinema, a product of the old movie palaces who’s adapted himself to the era of the VCR and the multiplex. But Alfredo--as Noiret memorably and beautifully plays him--is the soul of the old cinema. He’s intimately involved with the “Golden Age,” the black-and-white movies of the ‘20s-’40s, and, playing him, Noiret summons up the image of the great beefy French character actors of the period, the Raimus and Michel Simons. When he dies, the Cinema Paradiso does too, torn down on the same weekend as Alfredo’s funeral. Videos and TV, both of which Salvatore probably directs, have killed it.

Tornatore began as an award-winning photographer and he’s stronger on imagery than psychology, on the film past than the real-life present. The spirit of Fellini hovers over the movie house and the city square, Antonioni over the chilly, bare Rome apartments and Visconti over the seascapes. This 33-year-old film maker may actually have given too much of himself to the 53-year-old Salvatore, who acts more like an alienated young bachelor. Perhaps the movie’s main flaw is the way Tornatore lets Salvatore off the hook; it is Alfredo who demands that his protege leave town and never look back, as if absolving Toto for his selfishness.

There’s a tricky balance here. But Noiret--a consummate craftsman even, as here, when he’s being dubbed into Italian--keeps Alfredo real and earthy, a lugubrious-looking bear who turns preternatural wizard in the booth. Salvatore may become a cinema aristocrat, but this illiterate old peasant has a tactile love affair with the movies, the takeup reels, the gigantic single projector that pours its blaze of light through an aperture formed into the shape of a roaring lion.

Beneath Alfredo is an entire community that Tornatore lovingly re-creates. While Alfredo shows movies like Renoir’s social-realist classic “The Lower Depths” or Visconti’s Sicilian epic “Le Terra Trema,” the audience divides up into classes too. Up in the balcony is a bespectacled snob who spits on the rabble below. Underneath is a hurly-burly of working men and women, prostitutes, local families and small children like Toto.

Tornatore catches this rowdy crowd in a spirit of satire, but he also fills the movie with odd, reverent imagery. Sex and religion, mysticism and sensuality, are the twin poles of “Paradiso.” For every film homage, for every clip of Errol Flynn smooching or Vittorio De Sica gambling or Brigitte Bardot lusciously in the nude, there’s often a religious symbol: the local priest who rings his bell at obscenities; the plaster Madonna flaming up along with the burning stills of Bogart or Buster Keaton. Toto is altar boy as well as Alfredo’s assistant; he crosses himself when he enters the projection booth. When the new Cinema Paradiso opens, priests bless it and then recoil from the “pornographic” sight of a torrid Silvana Mangano mambo. And when now-blind Alfredo makes his first visit there he asks, almost plaintively, “Any room for me in the new paradise?”

Is there any room? “Cinema Paradiso” (Times-rated Family despite language and lovemaking) is not just about the relationship or tragedy of Toto and Alfredo. It’s about the loss of a whole culture, a whole era--a time when audiences gathered in intimate communion in their favorite movie houses, when movies and distribution weren’t calculated, homogenized and marketing-hooked to death, and when the people who showed and watched them loved them madly.

It may seem absurd or oversentimental to keep linking up films with objects of worship and love affairs as Tornatore does here, but it reflects how people really felt, how many of us feel now.

And when Salvatore the movie aristocrat watches, in a modern screening room, the last gift bequeathed to him by his old friend, the peasant-worker of “Cinema Paradiso,” it’s a moment of epiphany that goes beyond sentimentality. It’s a flood of passion, a collage of tenderness. It suggests the moment when cinema, released in the dark, almost becomes paradise.

‘CINEMA PARADISO’

A Miramax Films release. Producer Franco Cristaldi. Director/script Giuseppe Tornatore. Camera Blasco Giurato. Editor Mario Mora. Music Ennio Morricone, Andrea Morricone. Production design Andrea Crisanti. Costumes Beatrice Bordone. With Philippe Noiret, Jacques Perrin, Salvatore Cascio, Marco Leonardi, Agnese Nano, Antonella Attili, Pupella Maggio. In Italian with English subtitles.

Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes.

Times-rated: Family.