Cut from the same cloth but right on the heels of CINEMA PARADISO (1988), Ettore Scola's love letter to cinema has been woefully wheezing under the former's colossal shadow ever since its untimely timing, SPLENDOR is the name of a one-screen movie theater in a parochial Italian town, managed by Jordan (Mastroianni) for over three decades, who takes it over from his father in the 50s, but plagued by low attendance when the allure of the celluloid starts dwindling and the competition from television swelling, a valediction is cut and dried, but (fake) snowflake embellished.
Alternating between monochromatic flashback and current affairs, the story-line jauntily takes liberty with its time-frame and welds episodes of Jordan's life with various screenings, from an open-air showing of METROPOLIS (1927) when he was a 12-year-old boy, to a silent tear-running moment as a prodigal son watching IT'S WONDERFUL LIFE (1946), not to mention the self- referential nod of Dino Rosi's IL SORPASSO (1962), of which Scola is the co-screenwriter.
A triad in Splendor includes Jordan, a French showgirl Chantal (Vlady) whom he is besotted with and a geeky cinephile Luigi (Troisi), who later becomes the projectionist. Affairs are approached with alacrity, the fling between Luigi and Chantal burns and fades just like a flash in the pan, and what conspicuously remains is Jordan's abiding pique towards a guileless Luigi who is never daunted by the bad blood, from whom Troisi projects a funny and thoroughly sympathetic persona through his wide-eyedness and just a scintilla of guile (that mustache always goes his way). A tangible connection has been building through the odd pair's quasi-father-and-son dynamism (a small anecdote, the same year, they did play father and son in another Scola's picture WHAT TIME IS IT? 1989) including a superlative poker-game scene where they carry out a bluff's bluff in tandem.
With Mr. Mastroianni in his usual competence and Ms. Vlady generously doling out her voluptuousness (although it turns out to be a stretch for both to play the full spectrum of a gaping 30-year span all by themselves, in spite of the rejuvenating effect of the silver magic), SPLENDOR is a fervent testimonial of cinema nostalgia and a toast to a bygone era, but also jovially taps into its national characteristic, for one thing, that bargaining for slap antics really could happen in reality if you bother to ask a honest-to-goodness Italian!
