Is There Life After Turkey? Tornatore Proves There Is

ROME —  Giuseppe Tornatore remembers his low point.

A film on which he had worked for years closed after a few days. Friends were politely suggesting a career change.

“Instead of committing suicide, I wrote a new film,” he said, laughing.

Two years after that dark period, the 34-year-old Tornatore is being hailed as Italy’s hottest new director in a decade.

The film that flopped in 1988, “Cinema Paradiso,” went on to win him an Oscar in 1990. And the movie written “in a moment of my life in which things were bad” is being released in a moment in which things couldn’t be better.

“Everything has gone so well,” said the grinning, baby-faced director, his eyes sparkling behind horn-rimmed glasses. “I’m sorry there was so much delay.”

Two years after its dismal debut, “Cinema Paradiso” is alive and well in Italian cinemas, and has drawn crowds in Europe, Japan and the United States.

Now, the question is whether Tornatore can succeed again, and prove himself an heir to Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci and other great Italian directors.

His new film, “Stanno Tutti Bene” (They’re All Fine), has just been released in Italy and is due to open in the United States in February.

It tells of an elderly man’s journey through Italy to visit his five widely scattered children, whom he wants to reunite for a dinner.

The father, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is chagrined to discover that his children have drifted from him and have hidden their failures at work and in marriage.

“I wanted to make a film about the difficulty there is today in personal communication,” Tornatore said.

While the film displays Tornatore’s keen eye for the Italian character and for day-to-day human comedy, it is more melancholy than “Cinema Paradiso,” a semiautobiographical tale of a child enraptured by the silver screen.