Influential Italian actor-director Nanni Moretti offers a career summing-up in his new film A Brighter Tomorrow.
Many filmgoers who grew up venerating Nanni Moretti — his smart left-wing politics and his acute zeitgeist analysis in some amazingly on-the-mark films, from Dear Diary to The Caiman – will rejoice to learn that A Brighter Tomorrow (Il sol dell’avvenire) once again features the Italian anti-icon inveighing against a wrong-headed world. But times have changed and it’s not very clear if the director-actor-writer-producer has anything vitally important to add to his filmography in this narratively complex, generally downbeat work. What comes through most strongly is a striking sense of loss and disappointment in the character he plays, an aging man whose despair seems very personal and tinges the whole film (which is theoretically a Morettian comedy) with sadness and bitter farewells. It has performed well with Moretti’s fan base in Italy, however, reaching second place at the box office on its release.
Even as the director points a shaking finger at the evils of commercial filmmaking and streamers, he salutes the greats like Fellini, Kieslowski, Scorsese, the Taviani brothers and even Tarantino in a proud insistence that standards exist and filmmaking is a moral enterprise. These references do win the film cinephile points, along with a joyous musical scene that tips a hat to Moretti’s own actors, and offer some of the more light-hearted moments. Who can take issue with his despair over the dumbing-down of culture, which is graphically visualized in a nightmarish meeting with three Netflix execs, and then in a long scene in which veteran filmmaker Giovanni (Moretti) brings a cocky young director’s movie set to a halt while he decries the proliferation of gratuitous violence in films. But neither of these scenes rises to a high level of comedy.
Probably the most complicated narrative in any of his films, the story jumps erratically from the 1950’s and Giovanni’s youth to the present, where he is in the middle of shooting a film aided by his long-suffering producer and wife Paola (Margherita Buy) and his spritely French co-producer Pierre (a 5-star perf from the delightful Mathieu Amalric).
Setting the stage for a political spoof is the film’s Italian title, Il sol dell’avvenire (literally, the sun of the future), a metaphor-turned-cliché that goes back to Garibaldi and refers to the radiant future awaiting the workers of the world when Socialism is achieved. One can feel Moretti measuring himself against the classic utopian reflection of the Taviani’s St. Michael Had a Rooster (explicitly cited) in which an idealistic Italian anarchist employs his years in solitary confinement imagining political debates in his head; only years later does he discover the revolution is already over. To put it mildly, it’s a hard act to follow.
Communist utopia is the subject of one of the films-within-the-film here, set in Rome in 1956 at a time when the Italian Communist Party attracted many followers as a left-wing alternative to the Christian Democrats – until Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest. One wonders how many younger or non-Italian viewers know a crucial historical fact, around which the whole film pivots; namely, that the CP led by Palmiro Togliatti brazenly backed the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary. This is a key piece of information to make sense of the tricky, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ending.
Is the invasion of Hungary, perhaps, intended as a subtle way to reflect on the current Russian aggression in Ukraine without ever mentioning it? In Giovanni’s film, a patriotic Communist seamstress (Barbora Bobulova) and the less courageous editor of the Communist daily L’Unità (Silvio Orlando) have to decide whether to stand up on the side of the oppressed Hungarians, here represented by a troupe of Hungarian circus performers, or follow the party line. Unfortunately, as we know, history has disappointed everyone, and the only way out for Moretti is a fantasy ending. The finale is exhilarating and highly contagious, bound to dispel some of the existential gloom of what has gone before and will leave festival audiences (the film is in competition at Cannes) feeling good.
Completely dominating the film in the central role, Moretti pushes the self-irony that has always made his characters enjoyable beyond humor in portraying a pontificating grouch, a self-absorbed oldster with a tragic view of the world. Though he has given admirable dramatic perfs playing not-himself in top-rated films like We Have a Pope and The Son’s Room, Moretti here lapses into a cantankerous variation of his stock character, and who knows where the exaggeration begins? In the film, Giovanni laments he only makes one film every five years. Yet Moretti’s last film was the Three Floors in 2021 and he has been averaging a new release every three years, so there is already a gap between the director and his screen alter-ego, though he does everything to efface it.
One of the finest performances belongs to Buy. In Moretti’s My Mother, she played a film director torn between work and personal problems. Here she is equally convincing as a film producer trying to get her life straight and wriggle out of Giovanni’s needy, manipulative clutches. Getting a smile in a small part is Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr, who plays a beatific ambassador in love with Giovanni and Paola’s much younger daughter (Valentina Roman); these characters bring forward the family dynamics part of the story, which however feels more like an interruption of the main story than an independent thread.
The whole film is happily suffused with toe-tapping music by top Italian folk singers (most notably Franco Battiato, Fabrizio De André and Luigi Tenco), which often initiates an impromptu dance sequence like the lovably awkward scene of Giovanni and Paola unable to resist bopping to Aretha Franklin’s ‘Think’ on the car radio.
Director: Nanni Moretti
Screenwriters: Francesca Marciano, Nanni Moretti, Federica Pontremoli, Valia Santella
Cast: Nanni Moretti, Margherita Buy, Silvio Orlando, Barbora Bobulova, Mathieu Amalric, Valentina Romani, Flavio Furno, Zsolt Anger, Jerzy Stuhr, Teco Celio
Producers: Nanni Moretti, Domenico Procacci
Cinematography: Michele D’Attanasio
Production design: Alessandro Vannucci
Costume design: Silvia Segoloni
Editing: Clelio Benevento
Music: Franco Piersanti
Sound: Alessandro Zanon
Production companies: Fandango, Sacher Film, Rai Cinema
World sales: Kinology
Venue: Barberini cinema (Rome)
In Italian
95 minutes
