When you stop and look at your past, two things can happen and neither of them are good. The first is to suddenly realize what has been lost. For every decision made, a thousand were discarded and, at least in the imagination, everything became better. The second – slightly less spectacular but equally tragic – is to simply recognize that, despite everything, there is always the possibility of regret. Which is not a small thing. And even forgiving yourself. That’s a lot. The sun of the future It is the special and very unique way in which Nanni Moretti, a director who has been telling us his things for 50 years, looks at his life from the height of 70 years and takes more than just stock, he forgives himself. Yes, a thousand Battles were lost, the director says to himself, but there were at least a thousand battles shared. And lest there be any doubt, he closes the film with a parade of all (or almost) of the actors and colleagues who have accompanied him from the beginning. The strange thing is that what on paper seems like a simple exercise in narcissism (or even, more violently, masturbation) ends up being a shared adventure. Yes, and as strange as it may sound, all of us Moretti viewers ended up becoming a part of him too, although perhaps without his bad mood.
Moretti appears in his new work and in the viewer’s memory, the Italian director he is today shakes the hand of the one he was in 1993, when he made Caro Diario much more than just a simple autobiographical film (in truth, they are everything). ). This was a Vespa meditation on Rome, life, skin cancer and the skin of the cinema. The filmmaker offered himself as a victim in front of an audience with which he completely identified a pessimistic, funny and excessively hypochondriacal guy. So different from us that you could call it identical.
Now tells the story of a director determined to make a musical about the historical moment when everything was about to change. The year is 1956 and the Italian Communist Party (the only one in Europe) is rising up against the Soviet invasion of a Hungary that opposes Stalinism. It was, in Moretti’s ideology, the moment when everything was decided. The loss of this battle meant the loss of all others. Moretti talks about the left in general, but if you push him a little, he also talks a little about all of us. Maybe at some point we could have been better than we are, and if we look closely, we failed. But be that as it may, we are still here, aware of our every mistake and as remorseful and defeated as, most importantly, alive.
Let’s say that suddenly Moretti goes to Ser Moretti, the Moretti we remembered, the Moretti that turned into a part of the retina of each of us. Moretti meets Moretti and the cinema becomes the scene of a dream as hard, real and funny as any hard, real and funny vigil. Let’s assume that things have suddenly changed radically. The protagonist separates from his wife; The protagonist doesn’t know how to cope with Netflix (great WTF moment), and when the time comes, the protagonist even dances. Yes, Moretti is dancing. But in reality everything is still in the same place as always, in this strange, recognizable space where each of us can be a moody and sad Italian.
The trick is brilliant, to say the least: Cinema within a cinema where life looks at itself. It’s not the first time this has happened in the viewer’s filmography, but that’s exactly the point, that everything is as it once was. And so on until a state of mind that is as deeply melancholic as it is enlightening is achieved. Even warm. The 30 years that have passed for the protagonist have ultimately taken their toll on everyone. But it is also true that the new proposal comes with an unwelcome guest. What in the past was shamelessness, brutal exhibitionism, sincerity without an ounce of deceit; Well, maybe being complacent becomes overwhelming over time. We knew that Moretti’s ego was unbeatable, and the fact that he was also somewhat burdensome leaves us a little frozen. Moretti is aging and we are aging with him.
Be that as it may, Moretti is here and, as I said, his forgiveness belongs to us too.
