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FILM COMMENT
January/February 2002
Me, Myself, and Italy
Writer-director Nanni Moretti speaks
to ÷ and for ÷ a generation of Italians through his judgmental, self-absorbed heroes.
Deborah Young explains why the Last Diva gets to have his cake and eat it too
photo: The Son's Room
Read an interview with Nanni Moretti here.
Cinema as personal diary, recounting the filmmakerâs private life, convictions, obsessions, and growth from film to film, is terrain more often associated with an experimental filmmaker like Stan Brakhage than a Cannes Palme dâOr winner. Yet the work of Nanni Moretti, known as ãItalyâs last divaä for his charismatic, star-like presence, is above all the painfully honest, defiantly narcissistic, semi-fictionalized chronicle of a life (ãNanniâs lifeä) in which generations of frustrated left-wing Italians ruefully recognize their own autobiographies.
Ironically, The Sonâs Room ÷ the film that has catapulted this rebellious actor-director beyond his long-standing Italian-French axis of admirers, and has been selected as Italyâs Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film ÷ is atypical. His most realistic, least political, least comic picture, it is also his most scripted, most acted, and most moving. Those who know him only through this and his only other film to be distributed in the U.S., the 1994 Dear Diary, have seen just the tip of the iceberg, below which lie nine films that have made him the most influential Italian filmmaker of the last 25 years.
Pacing around the Sacher Film offices in a quiet residential section of Rome, Moretti has the satisfied face of a man of 48 who has always ãshouted the right thingsä and the body of an athlete who swam between the islands of Ventotene and Santo Stefano in Mass Is Over. Itâs well known to insiders that Moretti was torn between calling his company Sacher, after the Austrian chocolate cake he adores, or Water Polo Film, after his favorite sport. This blurring of personal and professional matters colors everything he does. He has also starred in three of the four films Sacher has produced for other directors, playing the wounded victim of terrorists in Mimmo Caloprestiâs The Second Time (La Seconda volta, 95) and a money-hungry politico in Daniele Luchettiâs The Factotum (Il Portaborse, 91). On a back street in Trastevere, the picturesque center of Romeâs nightlife, he and producing partner Angelo Barbagallo have run the homey but state-of-the-art Nuovo Sacher movie theater since they opened it ten years ago with Ken Loachâs Riff Raff. Banking on a cult reputation and a loyal audience, the independent theater rarely loses money. Edgar Reitzâs Heimat 2, whose 13 feature-length episodes screened one per week, developed an enthusiastic following. ãIt was our finest hour as exhibitors,ä claims Moretti, who celebrated his new vocation in a seven-minute short, The Day ãClose-Upä Opened. The same year, 1996, saw the beginning of the Sacher festival, a unique short film festival that has delighted Romans with its offbeat programs and tongue-in-cheek awards ceremony.
The son of two teachers of Greek and Latin, the man born as Giovanni Moretti began making Super 8 shorts in college. Excerpts from The Defeat (La Sconfitta, 73), a send-up of the Left, can be seen in Morettiâs 1989 feature Red Lob (Palombella rossa) as scenes from the protagonistâs college militant years. In Paté de bourgeois (73), he sits on the john loading a super-8 camera and holding meetings with his crew. The 50-minute How Do You Speak, Brother? (Come Parli Fratello?, 74) is a parody of Alessandro Manzoniâs classic novel The Betrothed. From these college adventures it wasnât much of a leap to feature-length Super 8. Iâm Self-Sufficient (Io sono un autachico, 76) premiered in film clubs to rousing applause for its 23-year-old maker. The characters, ambience, and style of his later work are all present in this disjointed but spirited opera prima. It may have taken Chaplin several years to develop the Tramp, but here Michele, Morettiâs alter ego in seven subsequent films, is already fully realized. Although his persona changes jobs and families in each film, itâs always Moretti whoâs the central figure, whether in the guise of ãMichele,ä or as himself (in Dear Diary and April), or finally as Giovanni, his real name, in The Sonâs Room. Here, Michele is a longhaired radical who belongs to an avant-garde theater group in thrall to a Buddhist tyrant-director. Just as their play, inspired by Beckett, Artaud, and Bataille, with a large helping of madness mixed in, spoofs the experimental theater of the day, so their politics is a collection of hyperbolically empty phrases that Michele has trouble digesting. Comically, he dreams that ãin the cinema, the actors are the bourgeoisie, the image is the proletariat, and the soundtrack is the petit bourgeoisie shifting from one to the other÷after a long struggle, the proletariat must take power.ä
Culturally and ideologically, Micheleâs ironic disenchantment with the way things are struck a nerve with Italian audiences. A year before the protest movements of 1977 shook up Italian society, Moretti was already nailing the banality behind fashionable slogans and satirizing his generationâs self-involvement. The following year he appeared for the first time as an actor in a film he didnât direct, playing the army buddy of a Sardinian shepherd enamored of language in the Taviani Brothersâ Padre Padrone. (Language, in fact, would feature prominently among Morettiâs own obsessions.)
His portrait of immature middle-class Roman boys professing left-wing politics is sharper and funnier in Ecce Bombo, whose untranslatable title is the cry of a man on a bicycle selling cylinders of cooking gas (an apocryphal figure from Italian urban legend), eerily echoing the biblical ãEcce Homo.ä ãFrom the beginning, I treated myself and my world not only with affection, but also with irony and distance,ä notes Moretti. ãI made fun of myself, my generation, and the audience, something the Left would never do,ä because even the post-Stalinist new Left reflexively presented a monolithic united front to the world. Morettiâs irreverent approach clicked with audiences and the film was a surprise hit; as the director observes, ãViewers rushed to identify with the characters, even when they had nothing in common with them.ä Here, the Michele character has a tense home life with his parents and sister, who feel intimidated by him. He and his friends start a male consciousness-raising group on the feminist model in hopes of understanding why theyâre incapable of forming serious relationships. With the appearance of a collection of stray fragments, Ecce Bombo garners what coherency it has from the power of Morettiâs convictions. Micheleâs acid criticism of family, friends, and society (including such contemporary myths as peace and music festivals and talk radio) doesnât make him particularly likeable, but it does lay down the terms of a rigorous moral manifesto, with a built-in element of self-parody, that Moretti will elaborate in subsequent films.
A diehard idealist, Michele/Moretti is the mortal enemy of those who adapt to circumstance and spread the sins of banality, vulgarity, and cliché. Heâs ready to beat up his family over their careless Italian, full of Milanese expressions. ãThe way you talk!ä he cries in horror when a journalist in Red Lob comes out with three clichŽs in the same sentence, ãLanguage is important.ä This finickiness naturally extends to movies. In Iâm Self-Sufficient, he expresses a violent distaste for Lina Wertmüller, gets into a fistfight in Ecce Bombo over popular comic Alberto Sordi, and fumes over Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer in Dear Diary. For Moretti, itâs not just an issue of bad taste, but a whole approach to filmmaking that gives moral value to aesthetic choices.
Morettiâs next film, Sweet Dreams (Sogni dâoro, 81), explores a comic cinematic language poised at the brink of narrative. Michele Apicella (the maiden name of Morettiâs mother will stick to the character through the rest of the ãMicheleä films) is a young alternative filmmaker struggling against hostile audiences and critics, as well as his own creative anxiety, as he attempts to shoot his third film, La Mama di Freud. Embracing the surrealism of Felliniâs 8-1/2 while upping its narcissism quotient, Moretti further reduces the distance between art and life by playing himself as a caricature of an indie filmmaker harassed by an exasperating mother and obnoxious hangers-on. Wherever he shows his films, Michele is tormented by a recurring hostile question from some well-dressed audience member: What meaning can these movies possibly have for a southern field hand, an Abruzzi mountain shepherd, or a housewife from Treviso? In a triumph of the imagination, Moretti cuts to these three unlikely characters abandoning their hoes, sheep, and pasta and taking a train to Rome to see Micheleâs film.
Sweet Dreams abounds with invention, but itâs not of the cinematic kind. Morettiâs unremarkable, functional direction seems chiefly concerned with avoiding making ãa sly, banal, obvious, easy filmä like Micheleâs successful rival Giggio Cimino, with whom he squares off in a prophetically vulgar TV contest that includes insults, singing, boxing, and a humiliating race in which the two directors are dressed as penguins. Defeated, Michele cries like a baby and screams, ãShitty audience!ä The studio viewers chant these words of self-contempt with blind enthusiasm.
One narrative constant throughout Morettiâs work up until Dear Diary is Micheleâs stumbling search for love and affection, generally with a girl named Silvia ÷ again self-reflexively named after the directorâs sister and, much later, his wife. In Sweet Dreams sheâs played by a young Laura Morante, who first resists him, then seems more available, but is finally alienated forever when, during dinner at a restaurant, he turns into a werewolf. As the filmâs closing lines ÷ ãIâm a monster and I love you and I donât want to dieä ÷ suggest, this is not just a surreal comic ending but an anguished admission of Micheleâs inability to form human relationships.
The dark Bianca (84) again mixes many disparate ingredients ÷ a love story, a mystery, a school comedy. ãMy work as a director was influenced by my Îworkâ as a film viewer, where I let myself get caught up in emotions and the plot,ä he says. The script is more elaborate than before, but still far from straight narrative. Morante plays Bianca, a teacher at the super-hip Marilyn Monroe High School ÷ but the unconditional love fellow teacher Michele demands from her is impossible to give. Sporting a psychopath look, like Sweet Dreamsâs werewolf after a careful waxing, our hero reveals ever-deeper layers of neurosis, notably an obsession with infidelity, which is echoed in his extremely rigid attitude toward his students. In this open school, where a picture of Mick Jagger has replaced the portrait of the Italian president, where professores use jukebox tunes as teaching aids, and the resident shrink (played by Morettiâs father) is at the service of the faculty rather than the students, Michele just doesnât fit in. A police inspector suspects him of murdering his neighborâs faithless girlfriend (the first of several victims), but canât come up with a motive. We know itâs Micheleâs disappointment with people who adapt to lifeâs imperfections and their own weaknesses. In the previous films Micheleâs constitutional inability to compromise, in art as in life, made him admirable; here he is sent to jail for it. But you leave the film unsure if heâs guilty or not. His final confession could simply be paranoiac self-delusion: ãFriends disappoint you. They tell lies, separate. I choose my friends forever.ä Despite its share of good jokes, overall Bianca is far less funny than Morettiâs other films and a good deal more troubled. The closing line is an unsettling non sequitur ÷ ãItâs sad to die without children.ä
Moretti takes his self-reflexive anxiety one step further in The Mass Is Over (La messa è finita, 85) as a priest named Giulio. Clean-shaven and cheerful on the surface but with his youthful contentiousness and ferocious intolerance intact, Giulio is Michele/Moretti in all but name. Here again he demands that parishioners and friends alike view marriage and friendship as indissoluble unions ÷ and again, they disappoint him bitterly. Instead of getting married to her estranged boyfriend, his sister wants an abortion. His elderly father moves out to live with one of his daughterâs classmates, devastating his wife. Childish, moralistic, and uncomfortable talking about sex and love, Giulio is no help to anyone. His sense of solitude and futility mounts until finally he throws in the towel. ãItâs not about priests or faith, itâs about relationships with other people,ä says Moretti of the film, which he calls ãmy most realistic picture before The Sonâs Room.ä
Mass is not a pleasant film to watch. Its Morettian vision of loneliness is compounded by the sense of a void left by the vanished ideals of the Seventies, visualized in the scene of couples dancing in a church to the pop song ãYou Feel Alone with Your Freedom.ä At the same time, the film has a gentleness that captures another side of the Moretti persona ÷ a wistful longing for connection behind his fastidious bluster. Giulio is one of a long line of childish, self-absorbed men who hungrily observe other peopleâs relationships the way Sweet Dreamsâs Michele stares with longing at a Sacher torte in a pastry shop window. They display a tender fragility that makes them deeply sympathetic. But if the price of peace, love, and happiness is assuming adult responsibility, theyâre not willing to pay it. ãI believe in happiness,ä states Giulio at his motherâs deathbed, ãbut no man can be loved the way his mother loved him.ä
The frustration of watching early Moretti films, mixed with the pleasure of their humor, is that the viewer is continually faced with this seemingly unsolvable Freudian dilemma. Then, beginning with Red Lob in 1989, the focus suddenly shifts to other things ÷ politics, illness, and parenthood. Red Lobâs title refers to both a type of water polo shot and the Communist politics of the filmâs protagonist: suffering from amnesia, Michele/Moretti falls in with a water polo team on its way to Sicily for a match. Gradually recovering his memory, he realizes that he is a Communist parliamentary deputy who has recently made an amazing political gesture ÷ of which he has no memory.
The film is an intellectual delight, complex and open in its structure and ideas, blending more than ever before the Michele characterâs private and public sides to represent a generational way of thinking. Confused, problematic, and lacking a clear identity, he personifies the Italian Left at the end of the Eighties as it headed into a period of radical transformation. The filmâs centerpiece is an all-day, all-night water polo game filled with excitement, confusion, and conflicting desires. The troubling aspects of Micheleâs life appear in the background but frequently shift to the fore: the vulgar mass media represented by Mariella Valentiniâs reporter, the militant past, and the rose-tinted future that could represent the end of all ideals. As in all Moretti films, pop culture plays a significant role. Here itâs brilliantly used to pinpoint three moments of grand collective emotion: Doctor Zhivago showing on a poolside TV set, Bruce Springsteenâs ãIâm on Fireä on the radio, and the outcome of the water polo match itself. Finally Micheleâs ãamazing gestureä comes back to him: desperately trying to explain his partyâs aims in a live TV interview, words fail him and he bursts into song, shocking his interviewers into silence. Red Lob was the first picture produced by Sacher Films. ãWe could have saved a lot of money if we had shot the polo in Rome,ä notes Moretti, ãbut I wanted the game to be an away match so that the spectators would be against the young Communist. We shot it in Acireale, Sicily, in September of 1989. Two months later, the Berlin Wall fell and Occhetto, the Italian communist leader, proposed renaming the party.ä Moretti took the historic debate going on in the Italian Communist Party seriously. Although never a member himself, he understood the importance that relaunching the party along totally new lines would have for everyone on the Left. For his hour-long documentary The Thing (La cosa, 90), which he considers ãcomplementaryä to Red Lob, he visited eight party sections scattered around Italy to film the great debate as it took place among the rank-and-file. The film amusingly documents the Italian love of passionate speechmaking and gesticulation, but itâs also an important record of the historic moment that preceded the partyâs transformation into the leftist Democrats.
Dear Diary (Caro Diario, 93) and its follow-up, April (Aprile, 98), both drop the mask of an alter ego to chronicle the filmmakerâs life in a direct, first-person account÷though with ambiguous slippages. These two films ãdescribe what really happened to me,ä says Moretti, ãbut theyâre both still films that reflect choices in directing, acting, writing, tone, and style.ä Delightful and surprising, Dear Diary (winner of the Best Directing award at Cannes) consists of three episodes filmed in different styles. The first, ãOn My Vespa,ä expresses an unsuspected joie de vivre as the camera, more confident and mobile than ever before, follows Moretti in smooth traveling shots while he tools around a deserted Rome in August on his scooter. His ironic commentary on various Roman neighborhoods ends in painful silence as he locates the humble piece of sculpture that marks the spot where Pasolini was murdered in 1975, beside the littered, half-wild fields of Ostia.
The second and third episodes, ãIslandsä and ãDoctors,ä enlarge on the themes of suffering and solitude in a society whose citizens seem strangely detached or absent altogether. A film that makes poetry out of places, Dear Diary, in contrast to Red Lob, is largely free of people, noise, confusion, and television. Keeping his distance from those of his generation who look back regretfully on the compromises theyâve made, Moretti cockily proclaims, ãI shouted the right things and today Iâm a splendid man in my forties.ä His fans would probably agree. His bout with and recovery from what appeared to be cancer (but was finally diagnosed as Hodgkinâs disease) ends the film and prepares the way for the next chapter in Morettiâs life, the birth of his son Pietro.
April records a month of elation, not just because Morettiâs wife gives birth, but also because the Left, under the Olive Tree coalition, wins the Italian elections for the first time ever. These happy events are expressed through Morettiâs conflicting urges to make a militant documentary about the elections and a frothy musical comedy about a Trotskyist pastry-maker (Silvio Orlando) who dances his way through the Fifties. If Doctor Zhivagoâs embodiment of Communism made Michele clench his fist in Red Lob, one likes to think of Aprilâs pastry-maker as the rebellious model for a happier, lighter Moretti. An edited collage of bits and pieces, shot piecemeal without a script, April is certainly his most joyful film, and though itâs more anarchic than Dear Diary, itâs a little too similar÷the first-person experiment had run its course. Three years on, The Sonâs Room marks a radical break on nearly every level.
In these politically confused times, Moretti has remained an unwavering, even maddeningly obstinate moral beacon for the Italian Left in films that bring together his political convictions and personal outrage with a searingly honest crusade against personal suffering, loneliness, and the impossibility of communicating through clichés. Itâs hard to overestimate the effect of his work on younger Italian filmmakers who, for better or worse, have grown up as ãMorettiansä in search of a new film language. By breaking down familiar genres, his intimate, minimalist film diaries opened up new terrain where filmmakers could begin to reexamine cinema again. Together with Roberto Benigni, he offers an alternative to the one-way street of old-style Italian comedy, made ever more vulgar and meaningless by its television-trained scriptwriters. Paradoxically, as great as his influence has been on young directors, his films are a hard act to follow, not least because they are built on his own image and persona. Apart from a few scattered minimalist filmmakers, he can count no direct successors. To copy Moretti is to risk imitating a poet.
Deborah Young is a reviewer for Variety based in Rome.
© 2002 by Deborah Young
