2023-11-12 11:20:10
by Filippo Mazzarella
Moretti works with detachment, even when he recounts his most private odyssey: this is revealed by the extraordinary moments that connect that work to his latest, «Il sol dell’avvenire»
On 12 November 1993, Caro diario by Nanni Moretti was released in Italian cinemas, the seventh feature film by the director, who at the time was a “splendid” forty-year-old (as one of the most famous lines of the film notes, so much so that the use of the adjective before the declaration of age even entered common parlance), which opened a new phase in his career as an Author. A work divided into three “chapters” of real life: in the first, On a Vespa, Nanni rides a scooter in the middle of August through the streets of an emptied Rome, abandoning himself to notes on cinema, on Capitoline urban planning, on the nature of the inhabitants of the peripheral areas it passes through. To observe more closely the buildings that attract him, he pretends with their tenants to carry out inspections for an unlikely film to be made (the story of a Trotskyist pastry chef in 1950s Italy told in the style of a musical), harangues a rich man for no reason ( Giulio Base) stopped at the traffic lights in his Mercedes (“Even in a more decent society I will always find myself with a minority”), crosses Garbatella, explains his passion/desire for dancing which finally exploded with the vision of Flashdance (later meeting, in a parenthesis of casual surreality, the protagonist Jennifer Beals herself, whose “comfortable” shoes she obviously praises), goes towards Spinaceto to understand why it has always been spoken of in derogatory terms, visits Casal Palocco (which “smells of videocassettes”) hypothesizing a film “made only of houses”.
He then goes to the Fiamma cinema where they are showing «Henry – Pioggia disanguin/Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer», 1986, by John McNaughton and, disgusted by the vision, he reaches a film critic (Carlo Mazzacurati) guilty of exalting him like a masterpiece to harass him in his bedroom by rereading to him some passages of his most hyperbolic reviews. And his itinerary ends on the coast of Ostia, in the place where Pier Paolo Pasolini died. In Isole, eager to find peace to work on his new film, Nanni leaves for the Aeolian Islands where the “philosopher” Gerardo (Renato Carpentieri), who self-exiled there about ten years earlier, awaits him in Lipari. After dancing in a bar where they show Anna (1951) by Alberto Lattuada on TV to the tune of Armando Trovajoli’s song El Negro Zumbón, annoyed by the unusual confusion of the island, moves with his friend to Salina and with him he visit two friends (Raffaella Lebboroni and Marco Paolini) who have a demanding small child. Thus he discovers, after meeting another couple (Lorenzo Alessandri and Claudia Della Seta) with a school-age child, that the island is populated only by families with only children to whom the parents are grotesquely and totally subservient. While Gerardo, who began by quoting Enzensberger and his theories on medium zero (“Television is nothing”), finds himself strangely attracted to the programs of the most inferior TV, the two reach Stromboli, where a mayor (Antonio Neiwiller) with complexes of cultural inferiority would like to commission Ennio Morricone to create a soundtrack for the island and hire director of photography Vittorio Storaro to “illuminate” it.
And Nanni, on the slopes of the volcano, is forced here by Gerardo to ask American tourists for information on the most recent and unpublished narrative points of the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. The two then move to Panarea, from which they immediately flee, horrified by the welcome of a young well-to-do lady who informs them of an imminent “festival of bad taste” and arrive in the rugged Alicudi, where this time there is an intellectual to welcome them. – hermit (Moni Ovadia) who once revealed to the two the absolute lack of electricity on site causes Gerardo (now so blinded by cathodic dependence to have drafted an indignant letter to the Pope guilty of having excommunicated telenovelas) a desperate escape towards a return to “civilization”. In the last one, Medici, Nanni retraces his real ordeal as a patient before the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma: victim of strange nocturnal itching, excessive sweating and weight loss, he first finds himself turning in vain to a long series of doctors from whom he only obtains mountains of recipes for ever-changing drugs and dermatological products, then to an allergist who diagnoses intolerances to practically any food, then to oriental alternative medicine between acupuncture sessions and sessions with bizarre devices (the “electric plum blossom needle”), while a doctor-psychologist tries to blame him by claiming a psychosomatic nature of his ailments. Until, after an x-ray and a CT scan, they diagnose him with non-existent lung cancer which however leads to the discovery of the real disease and the therapy necessary to defeat it. Some time later, consulting a banal medical “glance”, he will discover that the symptoms of lymphoma are those which he had reported from the beginning in his anamnesis to all the specialists consulted and he will conclude that “Doctors know how to talk but they don’t know how to listen”, taking leave of audience, to whom he is speaking from a bar table literally flooded with all the useless medicines accumulated up to that point, with the lashing toast of a simple glass of water on an empty stomach.
Having definitively abandoned the alter ego of Michele Apicella (already put aside for Don Giulio in La messa è finite, 1985, but then recovered for the next film, Palombella rossa, 1989), Moretti constructs with Caro diario a surprising intimate journal in first person, representing for the first time only and uniquely himself, in a triptych of “chapters” characterized by the use of the camera with the function of caméra-stylo (camera-pen) theorized in illo tempore by Alexandre Astruc and folded to his peculiar and already widely canonized way of intercepting the present and its contradictions with cinema. Divided into three segments that are aesthetically different and narratively autonomous, but united by the final construction of an existential reflection-unicum [«l’anima, la mente, il corpo», P. Mereghetti], the film speaks first of all, on the level of pure cinema, of Moretti’s desire to push the very nature of images into an absolutely sui generis beyond with a narrative and visual freedom that his previous works had only partially intercepted or hinted at. And it is punctuated by an alternation of meetings, movements, contemplations, reiterations, reflections divided between voice over and contextuality to the action (breaking the already deliberately labile verisimilitude of the narrative), in which the usual autobiographical nature is only the declared starting point , reiterated and at the same time almost disavowed of the desire to overcome the boundaries of his own concept of staging.
It is a film that willingly lets itself be invaded by music, both original and otherwise (Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man, Angélique Kidjo’s Batonga, Cheb Khaled’s Didi, as well as the extraordinary original soundtrack by Nicola Piovani and Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert ) as will always happen in his subsequent cinema: and a concentration of even comical moments that are instantly cult for observant Morettians. But it is also a poignant film about loneliness and pain: a loneliness generated by different levels of intolerance (social, political, aesthetic, psychological) of which illness is only an “evident” phenomenon; and a pain which, in line with that which has always been told, from Ecce bombo to Sogni d’oro, from Bianca to La messa è fini to Palombella rossa passing through a cognition of otherness bordering on narcissism, takes on here for the first time the connotations underground of a more widespread and endemic malaise, less “personal” and more “universal”. Moretti operates with detachment, even when he recounts his most private odyssey: this is revealed by extraordinary moments (which rightly earned him the award for best director at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival) such as, in the first episode, the final camera-car (the only one in long shot) which ends on the neglected and semi-abandoned monument to PPP or to the material power of nature in the central chapter («Look at how he frames and freezes the Aeolian landscapes and their light. How he knows how to use long and very long shots. Who, if not Antonioni in L’avventura – but it’s just an example – had an eye like that, demonstrating that photography is not just a technique for reproducing nature, but a vision and interpretation of the world?” M. Morandini”). And it is still cloaked today by an awareness that makes it in hindsight one of the most precious tools for fully understanding his latest (final?) masterpiece, The Sun of the Future, which far too many people took the wrong way this spring.
November 12, 2023 (modified November 12, 2023 | 10:19)
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