Denerstein: Uncluttered Odeon Cine refreshingly foreign

Published July 1, 2006 at midnight

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What sort of all-American idiot would go to a movie in which the actors speak Spanish and the subtitles are in Italian, a language with which said idiot has only guide-book competence?

That idiot would, of course, be me.

On a recent trip to Florence (the Italian city, not the one in Colorado), I decided it might be fun to see a movie. As luck would have it, Pedro Almodovar's new Volver happened to be playing at the Odeon Cine Hall in the Piazza Strozzi.

Almodovar (Bad Education, Talk to Her and All About My Mother) doesn't usually make the kind of movies that are easy to understand without subtitles in one's own language. The director tends to favor playfully complex plots, but I'd read a lot about Volver - well-received at May's Cannes Film Festival - and decided it would be worth the language struggle. If nothing else, I could enjoy Almodovar's fluid camera.

In what Variety called "a return to his childhood roots," Almodovar constructs Volver around a fascinating premise: A recently deceased mother (Carmen Maura) returns as a ghost to tie up loose ends in her life. Her daughters (Lola Duenas and Penelope Cruz) occupy distinctly different positions in relation to their mother. Cruz's character carries some of the story's weirdest weight: She must deal with the murder of her husband and other unsavory matters.

Did I get every nuance? No, but I think I caught the gist. Obviously, I'll see Volver again before I review it, but I doubt whether I'll see it under such ideal conditions. The Odeon Cine Hall is a showplace theater. It's spacious and boasts plush seats with enough leg room to keep the average NBA player happy.

During the movie, no one talked, used a cell phone or felt compelled to whip out a BlackBerry. When the lights went down, a hush fell over the audience. The notion seemed almost quaint: Anyone who bought a ticket at the Odeon Cine Hall actually had come to see the movie.

I learned that an architect named Piacentini built the 600-seat Odeon in 1922 in the courtyard of Michelozzo's Renaissance palazzo. I suppose I don't need to point out that this is not your typical multiplex in a shopping mall.

The lobby was small with a modest (in size if not price) concession stand tucked into one end. You could buy the usual candy and popcorn, but you couldn't play video games or look at TV screens featuring endless trailers. Best of all, there was no carpeting that looked as if it had been designed by someone on a bad psychedelic drug experience.

Nothing about the place suggested the clangor and clutter of even some of our best multiplexes. The Cine Odeon was tasteful, with hints of luxury in its Art Nouveau decor.

It's ironic that Italy might have difficulty filling this palace with its own movies. Italian cinema seems to have left its glory days behind, a situation that seemed even more apparent when I switched on a TV that happened to be showing Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief.

The great 1948 neo-realistic masterpiece retains its power, but proved unwatchable when interrupted by lengthy commercials, some snappy and clever and some pumping out a low-rent blare that would have been right at home on late-night American TV. A friend who lives in Italy later told me Italian television ranks among the world's worst, but I didn't see enough to form an opinion.

None of this is to say that it's time to sound a death knell for Italian cinema. I recently read that Cinecitta Holding, a state-owned film group, recently brought 13 Italian films from the past several years to the Shanghai International Film Festival. The films included Gabriele Salvatore's I'm not Scared, which received wide play in the U.S., and Davide Ferrario's After Midnight, which didn't.

It's instructive to note that Ferrario's movie takes place in the Mole Antonelliana, a cinema museum in Turin. I haven't seen it, but the movie - which played in New York and a few other U.S. cities - evidently centers on a night watchman who happens to be a movie buff. Sounds like a new movie with one foot planted firmly in the past.

I probably shouldn't have been surprised that only a few Italian movies were playing around Florence. As with most of Europe, American fare tends to dominate: Some of it new, some a little long in the tooth: Il Codice Da Vinci needs no translation. Also playing: Radio America (aka Prairie Home Companion), The Sentinel, The Dark, X-Men and Poseidon.

My favorite listing: Il Succhiapollice, which happens to be the 2005 family drama Thumbsucker, a strange little American indie starring Lou Pucci and Tilda Swinton. My second favorite: the operatically grand Il Presagio, which sounds so much better than Omen.

No, I didn't spend much of my vacation time in movies - in fact, none aside from my visit to the Odeon. No movie should have to compete with the Tuscan hills, where I was fortunate enough to spend most of my three weeks.

But at the Odeon, I was flooded with feelings of deep nostalgia, a longing for a time when the buildings in which we watched movies didn't seem to be screaming messages of force-fed fun. It was a long way to go, but it was revitalizing to feel again as though movies deserved the grandest of stages.

denersteinb@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5424

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