Scorsese Restores “The Leopard” and Revives Cannes’s Golden Age

Burt Lancaster in Luchino Visconti's Il Gattopardo, before and after restoration.

A common refrain at Cannes is that the films, the stars, and the glamour ain't what they used to be. This is disheartening to a relative newcomer to the festival.

How far back in time does one have to travel to get a taste of Cannes in its prime? Is it 2001, when George Clooney and Brad Pitt walked up the steps of the Palais together for Ocean's Eleven? Or 1976, at the height of the auteur period, when Martin Scorsese won the Palme d'Or for Taxi Driver? Or 1960, when the prize went to La Dolce Vita? Certainly there were fewer film bloggers then.

The answer is: last night. Scorsese brought the past to us in full Technirama glory with a pristine restoration of Luchino Visconti's masterpiece, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), 1963's Palme d'Or winner. Le tout Cannes assembled at the Debussy theater for the screening. Here were jury members Benicio Del Toro and Kate Beckinsale. There was festival darling Juliette Binoche. Salma Hayek accompanied her billionaire husband, Francois-Henri Pinault, who runs Gucci, a partner in the restoration effort by Scorsese's Film Foundation. Also in attendance were the film's two stars, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, both fixtures of Cannes's golden age. The congregation waited for more than a half hour as Scorsese made his way, accompanied by Gucci designer Frida Giannini, through blocked Croisette traffic, and up the red-carpeted steps past paparazzi and the black-tie beau monde streaming into the Wall Street premiere. When he did arrive, his messianic aura rippled through the room, necks swiveled, and awestruck French film geeks shouted, "Fuck, it's Scorsese!"

"I live with this movie every day of my life," the director said when presenting Il Gattopardo, an epic adaptation of Giuseppe de Lampedusa's novel about an aristocratic Sicilian family's adjustment to a changing way of life during the Risorgimento. (It's Italy's Gone With the Wind.) Scorsese rhapsodized about the film's "deeply measured tone ... its use of vast spaces and also the richness of every detail."

As with every image printed onto celluloid, that richness and that detail—like the old aristocratic way of life, and like the glamour of Cannes' heyday—has faded over time. In the film, Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (a dubbed Burt Lancaster) says, "In order for everything to stay the same, everything must change." The line aptly describes the process of film restoration, which in this case involved 12,000 hours of work to transfer the 35 mm prints to a digital format, painstakingly remove 47 years' worth of dirt and scratches, and give the color a blood transfusion. The result is sublime, as close as possible to watching the film's first projection.

The colors are never more resplendent than in the sumptuous ballroom scene that makes up the last third the three-hour movie, from the deep red of the lobsters to the shimmering gold leaf, to the pastel hues of the gowns, and the, well, ochre of the chamber pots. Watching themselves waltzing onscreen, as one of the most beautiful couples in film history, Delon and Cardinale—now 75 and 72, respectively—grabbed each other's hands. After the screening, Delon, still dashing with a full head of white, longish hair (and from what I hear from a female audience member last night, still helplessly flirtatious), and Cardinale, elastic as a 20-year-old starlet, soaked in the audience's adulation as if they had just performed the film on stage. Visibly enamored, Scorsese, shorter than Cardinale by a few inches, stretched to kiss her on both cheeks.

Scorsese later stopped by at the after-party at the enchanting Eden Roc hotel, where Vanity Fair will host its party tonight.