Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2024

[Chris Knipp]

NANNI MORETTI: A BRIGHTER TOMORROW/IL SOL DEL'AVVENIRE (2023)


NANNI MORETTI IN A BRIGHTER TOMORROW

Moretti's study of a self-indulgent movie director is itself self-indulgent

Nanni Moretti is a special kind of Italian auteur who is priviledged in his own country. He even has his own movie theater in Rome. His work has varied from personal diary (Caro Diario) to the emotionally ravaging tale of family loss The Soh's Room, which won him the Palme d'Or at Cannes (he dealt effectively with the loss of a mother in Mia Madre), to the oddball study of the election of a Pope, Habemus Papem, and the attack on Berlusconi, The Caiman. Many of Moretti's films, though, feature a thinly disguised version of hiimself. A Brighter Tomorrow/Il sol del'avvenire returns to that format. It has been deemed a return to form by some, but that's a stretch. The last one, Tre Piani/Three Floors, (20211) got his bottom score ever on Metacritic, 42. A Brighter Tomorrow has a 47, his next-worst-ever score.

There have been a few pretty positive assessments of the new film. But Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian, usually a generous critic, while describingThe Son's Room as "the greatest Cannes Palme d’Or winner of the century so far," calls this new one "bafflingly awful." That's slightly harsh. Some will find its leftist reworking of Fellini's 8 1/2, with Moretti himself confidently, if sometimes gratingly, in the Mastroianni/Fellini role, to be intermittently watchable. But it can definitely be recommended only for Moretti completists outside his home turf, where it has been well received. Note that since the Palme d'Or, Moretti gets free inclusion in Competition at Cannes, and as a result this film has been reviewed in all the major journals, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Daily, IndieWire, etc. That all those critics bothered to write reviews means something.

Giovanni (Moretti, going by his real first name) is a director working on a movie about Italian communists during the time of the Hungarian Revolution. At the same time he, nearing age 70 (as is Nanni) faces near chaos, which he faces with a rgidity that's self-mocking, but hardly cuddly. His producer (an oily, grinning Matthieu Almaric) bolts; his wife of 40 years, also his partner and produceer (Margharita Buy, familiarly in this role) is telling him she's splitting. And this is pretty obviously not a movie that would ever get made anyway. The way Giovanni makes arbitrary changes in his film at the last minute is more obnoxious than auteurist.

But as Lee Marshall of Screen Daily puts it in one of the most favorable reviews, Moretti here can be seen as "once again" having created "edgy comedy out of a process of self-therapy." Moretti, who is tall and still fairly good-looking and carries himself well, still presents a commanding figure on screen, while sometimes being funny, sometimes even appealing.

Giovanni, who forces his family to watch Jacques Demy classic Lola before each production (this time they walk out), has no time for actors who improvise or otherwise bring their own ideas to the set and In one scene he takes a pair of scissors to a freshly tailored costume saying this will makes it look more "realistic." Unfortunately there isn't much in this film and its film-within-films (there are two; another one being produced by young Koreans) that is realistic, though an unproductive meeting with Netflix is a grim breath of global commerce.

At the end, there is simply a parade of Moretti's friends and actors in former films, one more pointless self-indulgence in a film that has been a string of them. And one more thing that will delight his Italian fans.

A Brighter Tomorrow/Il sol dell’avvenire, 95 mins., debuted at Cannes 2023. Screened for this review as part of the annual Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center (May 30-Jun. 6, 2024). Showtimes at the Walter Reade Theater:
Saturday, June 1 at 8:00pm
Thursday, June 6 at 3:30pm