It happens more and more rarely to get out of a made in Italy movie taking with you, in the eyes of memory, an undeletable image, a symbol like frame - like those that left us the magic appearance of the fellinian Rex, The Last Emperor 's courtyard where PuYi as a kid runs, the little kid dancing Amapola in Once Upon a Time in America, the ship full of desperate people by Gianni Amelio. Good news instead: from The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean, the highly awaited film by Giuseppe Tornatore, you get out with a bunch of thrilling and unforgettable images, and with the sensation that, in spite of the prejudices, the crisis, the announced rebirths, Italian cinema has still a lot to say.

Because with The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean the miracle of great Italian cinema returns - and it is "great" cinema, the one Tornatore's movie belongs to with right. Not so much because of its magnificent productive apparatus (those "production values", as they call them in the field, which are too often looked at with suspicious indifference almost as if they polluted creativity and which here are guaranteed by an unusual budget, forty billion Italian Lire from Medusa and New Line). How much and above all why the film refers to the tradition of a cinema which almost does not exist anymore, to invented, visionary, risky, ambitious, irrealistic cinema which is so little part of our tradition - and which in our cinema history has had a maestro like Fellini, from whom many moments of the Legend seem to descend almost in the form of homage.

In a way it is a surprise: because Tornatore has always been a director of feelings and ideas more than one of great cinematic vision - even if he had started to get closer to such vision with The Starman. It is also surprising that the vision, apart from some minor failings and some tiredness, is here connected with such a balance to a feeling which is never sentimentalism - almost as if Tornatore, who wrote the script, amplifying in the gigantic dimension of two hours and forty minutes the brief monologue by Alessandro Baricco (Novecento, Feltrinelli), had put aside emotional excesses, being satisfied of the richness of the visual framing and of the force of his invention.

The film, which for its beautiful folly really deserves the title of legend, is, as everybody knows, the story of Nineteenhundred, who got this name bacause he was found new born child in a lemon box in the Ocean liner Virginian on the first day of the century. And on that ship, he never got off from, he became a pianist, a genious, whose fame runs on the oceans - so much that the great Jelly Roll Morton decides to get on the ship just to challenge the mysterious colleague in a piano duel which is one of the most beautiful scenes of the film.

The story is told in a flash back puzzle by Max, a trumpet player who becomes Nineteenhundred's best friend and who tries with no success to convince him to get off, to try a normal life. Idea that tempts Nineteehundred only for a moment, when in the crowd that fills the ship he sees the luminous figure of a girl ( the enchanting Mélanie Thierry, who has the only fault of disappearing too soon): but Nineteenhundred won't make it, he won't leave the Virginian, not even confronted with the temptation of looking at the sea from the earth, and not even, later, found back from his friend Max, confronted with the risk of exploding wth the about to be destroyed ship. Let's call it "the impossibility of being normal".

The legend invented by Baricco can be read perfectly as the metaphor of the artist condition, who can't recognise himself in the traditional lifestyles and landmarks, always at mid way between different worlds, able to speak only through his art. But thanks to the two actors - a dry, contained, minimalist Tim Roth, who is intense just in his own modesty, breaking out only when he's sitting at the keyboard, and the fantastic Pruitt Taylor Vince, with his big and good face of an everyday man and his restless eyes - the novelistic side, as improbable and fantastic as it can be, prevails on allegory.

While the antology sequence is that, of pure directorial virtuosism, who sees Nineteenhundred and Max, in the big ballroom of the ship in the middle of the storm, while they slide back and forward with the piano playing its music. It is the music in the end Nineteenhundred's emotional glue. To the great jazz repertoire and to the broken out music played by pianists Gilda Buttà, Amedeo Tomasi, the Alexander Rag Time Band and other musicians, the beatiful music written for the film by Ennio Morricone is added. He creates a seductive theme, one of those which follow you out of the theatre, like in the old good times.

(La Repubblica 28 ottobre 1998)