Review of Il Postino: The Postman (1994)
Seen in 2021.
A communist is beaten to death by the police. Six years earlier, he looks at a photo of a man he knows in distant USA, a country impossibly wealthy and distant from Procida, his Italian island. In the intervening time, he befriends the poet Pablo Neruda and, through him, finds love.
A significantly more social-/socialist-realist Porco Rosso (1992) with Neruda as Porco and no airplanes but similar music. It tries to be as smart as Cinema Paradiso (1988), and though it doesn’t quite succeed, the mid-1990s analog European aesthetic is powerful in this depiction of the year 1950. The film’s extradiegetic allure is boosted by the fact that star and co-writer Massimo Troisi died immediately after principal photography was completed, which must have some relationship with the suddenness of his character’s death.