Open Roads ’24: A Brighter Tomorrow

The Italian Communist Party (PCI) received direct financial support from the Soviet Union, so obviously they had no independence whatsoever. They refused to condemn the terrorism of the Red Army Faction and parroted Party propaganda demonizing democracy advocates during the Hungarian Revolution and the Czechoslovakian invasion. Inevitably, many prominent members broke from the Party in ’56 and ’68, but the PCI stayed loyal to its Soviet masters as an institution. The PCI’s massive hypocrisy is ripe for savage mockery, but that is absolutely not happening in Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow, which screens during this year’s Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.

As usual, Moretti plays a filmmaker not so different from himself. Giovanni yearns to make an Italian adaption of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” but his current film is a story of a neighborhood PCI club, who are hosting a Hungarian circus troupe, right as the Soviet tanks roll into Hungary.

Giovanni conceived his film as a musical, vaguely in an Umbrellas of Cherbourg bag, using sentimental old Italian pop songs. He wants to evoke nostalgia for the glory days of PCI clubs, so Giovanni needs to somewhat whitewash the PCI’s history. As director of A Brighter Tomorrow, the real-life Moretti is clearly trying to rehabilitate the real-life PCI. Consequently, the film runs interference for Italian Communists on multiple meta-levels.

When not excusing away an oppressive ideology, A Brighter Tomorrow engages in self-indulgently neurotic rom-com humor. This film should inspire fresh new respect for Woody Allen, because his angsty, nebbish, classic movie-loving, frustrated artist shtick is obviously harder than it looks.

A Brighter Tomorrow had tremendous potential for satire, but Moretti openly engages in wish-fulfillment, creating a PCI rebellion against CCP orthodoxy that literally never happened. You have to wonder what the legendary Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr (who worked extensively with Krzysztof Kieslowski and Andrzej Wajda) really and truly thinks of Moretti’s final cut. In this film, Stuhr plays the Polish ambassador, who happens to be the much older boyfriend of Giovanni’s college student daughter Emma, so keep those Woody Allen comparisons coming.

Moretti’s Mia Madre

Film directors are usually control freaks. It just goes with the territory. That’s great for their auteurist visions, but not so hot for personal relationships. Margherita’s mother still loves her anyway, even in periods of ill health and maybe not quite 100% sound mind. The headstrong daughter should probably start preparing for the inevitable, but she has a didactic art film to finish first in Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Vittorio was the closest thing Margherita had to a muse, but that did not stop her from dumping him midway through their latest shoot. Barry Huggins, a famous American character actor supposedly fluent in Italian will soon be joining the production, but he most definitely will not be taking Vittorio’s place. Frankly, she is far too preoccupied with her mother Ada’s health, but so far she has left most of the hard work to her older brother Giovanni. She is also trying to be a reasonably responsible mother to her Latin-flunking, Vespa-yearning daughter Livia, but it does not come natural to her.

Unfortunately, developments on the set push Margherita to the verge of a nervous breakdown. The high maintenance Huggins might understand Italian, but his fluency is iffy and his memorization of lines is even more suspect. Plus, just about every technical problem imaginable threatens to rob the world of another overwrought melodrama about unionized strikers.

Mia Madre’s acute attention to personal crises definitely makes it feel like a Nanni Moretti film, but it is hard not to hear Georges Delerue’s soaring themes from Truffaut’s Day for Night welling up in the back of your head. Considering the ways the two films parallel each other (socially awkward, semi-autobiographical filmmakers whose sanity and latest productions are nearly undermined by untimely tragedy), it is hard to imagine Moretti wasn’t engaging with the Oscar winner on some level.

Be that as it may, Mia Madre is a fine work with an unusually high quotient of emotional truth. Margherita Buy takes another slyly subtle star turn as Margherita the namesake director, proving she is one of the best in the business. John Turturro is quite a good sport hamming it up as Huggins (who else could he be lampooning, but himself?), yet when we least expect it, he and Moretti will irreversibly humanize the Yankee prima donna. Moretti the helmer-thesp (who has not infrequently been cast in other people’s movies) oozes dignity as the wise, soul-weary Giovanni. He just can’t help being charismatic on-screen. However, Giulia Lazzarini is doing standard TV movie-central casting stuff as the spirited but slowly fading Ada.

Mia Madre is a very nice film, but Day for Night is a masterwork. That is an unfair comparison, but Moretti seems to invite it. Nevertheless, Buy follows up her wonderfully understated turn in the grossly underappreciated A Five Star Life with another notably smart and mature performance. Recommended for patrons of Italian cinema and fans of Turturro, Mia Madre opens this Friday (8/26) in New York, at the Lincoln Plaza uptown and the Angelika Film Center downtown.

Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope

Popes are infallible, but cardinals are not. Nevertheless, cardinals elect popes to be infallible, at least when speaking Ex cathedra. Nanni Moretti addresses that contradiction, though not exactly in those term. Yet, for all his materialist bluster, Moretti (like any good Italian) maintains a sense of awe for the church and its rituals in his latest film, We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam), which opens this Friday in New York at the IFC Center (trailer here).

We do not really know what happens during a conclave to elect a new pope, but Moretti imagines it to be something not unlike the vanishing American caucus system. After a number of straw polls, a dark horse candidate emerges, defeating all the presumptive favorites. Frankly, everyone is quite relieved, except the French Cardinal Melville.

Rather stunned at first, the Pope-elect becomes increasingly agitated as the magnitude of his new position sinks in. Paralyzed with self-doubt, he refuses to address the faithful from the balcony, which is quite puzzling to them, given the white smoke wafting in the air. Thus begins a concerted campaign to coax the new Pope to assume his mantle. Until he does, the conclave is technically still on.

Enter Moretti himself as a psychiatrist recruited to quell the Pope’s anxieties. Unfortunately, he is not a believer, which ought to make things rather awkward. However, he fits in rather well with the cardinals, but he does not make much progress with the Pontiff.

Habemus is about one hundred times more sympathetic to the Church than one would expect from the central conflict. Moretti depicts the ceremonies and sacraments with a respect approaching reverence. However, portraying Cardinal Melville as a failed actor is clearly a mistake, because it automatically brings to mind Karol Wojtyła, who performed in many underground stage productions before eventually becoming Pope John Paul II, one of the Twentieth Century’s most vigorous (and successful) advocates for human freedom and dignity.

Frankly, it is difficult to buy into the premise of a cardinal of considerable years and standing reluctant to heed such a call to service. However, two of the gentleman giants of European cinema have the presence and authority to sell-it, or least suspend disbelief. Deftly avoiding theatrics, Michel Piccoli sets the perfect melancholy tone as the new Pope, while Jerzy Stuhr (so memorable from the classic films of Krzysztof Kieslowski) gives the film some worldly heft as the harried Papal spokesman (hmm, wonder which Pope brought him on board).

Despite the implications of its third act, Habemus takes more shots at the vacuous media and the dogmas of psychiatry than the Catholic Church Moretti left. Surprisingly gentle in its humor, We Have a Pope is a good film for audiences who can buy into the unprecedented crisis of faith when it opens tomorrow (4/6) in New York at the IFC Center.