Ciao

Living here day by day, you think it's the center of the world. You believe nothing will ever change. Then you leave: a year, two years. When you come back, everything's changed. The thread's broken. What you came to find isn't there. What was yours is gone. You have to go away for a long time... many years... before you can come back and find your people. The land where you were born. But now, no. It's not possible. Right now you're blinder than I am.

Just finished watching Cinema Paradiso, which was fantastic - and I hesitate to say this, because it seems to be said far too often, with far too little reason - one of the best tributes to movies and their power that I've ever seen.

The movie's also about personal growth (aren't they always?), and it's interesting that the above quote is one of the two posted on the imdb profile. For me, coming back to Toronto, the thread is indeed broken. There is nothing here that I know anymore, nothing that ties me here. I suppose that was part of the problem at the US border. The main character (as an adolescent) leaves his home town, becomes established as a filmmaker and never looks back, never goes back, never calls, partially because his mentor (the speaker of the above line) tells him not to, tells him that if he returns he'll refuse to see him, that he doesn't want to talk to him, he wants to be talking about him. And yet, you don't want to live without any sense of grounding, of belonging. There is (as there always is) a lost-love, a relationship which is never resolved and which he seems to have been searching for since he lost it, since it was taken away from him.

That certainly isn't attractive, but it is human. I suppose he finds meaning in his work, in his passion, which is summed up quite nicely in the finish, one of the most passionate 5 or so minutes of film I've ever seen. I don't want to spoil it, but it's amazing.

I've been told I'm terrible at this game, but doesn't the girl who plays the love interest look sort of like Grace Kelly? Just a little?