#nanni moretti

Bianca (1984)

Director Margherita (Margherita Buy) is making a movie (with little enthusiasm); she's very worried because her mother has been hospitalized with a serious illness, and the arrival of American actor Barry Huggins (John Turturro), a braggart who never remembers his lines, doesn't improve the atmosphere on set. Her recent sentimental relationship is now over, and Margherita must also endure the complaints of her thirteen-year-old daughter who refuses to study Latin, and the rebukes of her ex-husband, who openly accuses her of selfishness and contempt for others. Luckily, she has the support and affection of his older brother (Nanni Moretti), who has chosen to quit his job to be close to his mother. But one day, the doctors tell the two siblings that they must prepare for the worst....

Finally, in "Mia madre" (which I consider the director's best film), Moretti abandons the certainties that his autobiographical characters flaunted in his earlier films and isn't shy about laying himself bare, confessing even private doubts and uncertainties with unexpected sincerity (also driven by the loss of his own mother, to whom he was very close). The small yet grand story of his movie is told with a deliberately subdued filming style that mixes the tenses and modes of the story (where past and present intertwine with reality and dreams), radically changing the tone of his previous works to force the viewer to question the truth of a narrative that progresses through the accumulation of characters and situations, shifting the film's focus toward introspection and confession. The screenplay is not without its quips and ironies (the American actor's pomposity; Moretti's own directorial poses, which Buy plays (including his Brechtian obsessions with the "actor-character"); but what prevails above all is a poignant and melancholic disenchantment, in which the awareness of one's own limitations ends up being more important than the looming drama of death. Because it is precisely through the mother's human finiteness that the film (and Moretti) question their own actions, choices, and deeds; and always with a balance far removed from the triumphalism of the past and a very promising outlook on the future ("To tomorrow" are the mother's and the film's last words).

r.m.

Palombella Rossa (1989) - Nanni Moretti

𝐿𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑜 𝑎𝑖 𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑖