19/04/2023 - With renewed irony, Nanni Moretti returns with a film about love and abandonment that showcases himself and all his cinema of the past

Mathieu Amalric and Nanni Moretti in A Brighter Tomorrow

With all the shrewdness of his gaze, Nanni Moretti has returned to portray himself, his obsessions and passions, presenting a new alter ego. A Brighter Tomorrow [+see also:
trailer
film profile], released in Italian cinemas on 20 April with 01 Distribution and then be in competition at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, cites in its title a verse from the famous partisan resistance song Fischia il vento (written to the melody of an equally famous traditional Soviet song) that represented the dream of a future without inequalities. The protagonist is in fact Giovanni (Moretti himself), a Roman director who is shooting a film set in Rome in 1956, the year of the Hungarian Revolution, when millions of citizens rebelled against Soviet domination, until the uprising was harshly repressed by the armed intervention of Moscow troops. Ennio (Silvio Orlando) is a journalist for L'Unità, the daily organ of the Italian Communist Party siding with the Soviet intervention, while his fiancée Vera (Barbora Bobulova), also a Party member, is determined to protest against the tanks in Budapest and the orthodox line of PCI secretary Palmiro Togliatti. In those very days, a Hungarian circus, invited by the PCI, arrives in Rome and joins the protest.

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But the film that the director of the film within the film would really love to make, and which he fervently imagines, is the love story between two young people (Blu Yoshimi and Michele Eburnea) in the 1970s, studded with melancholic and evocative Italian songs, from Luigi Tenco to Fabrizio De André and Franco Battiato. Here, A Brighter Tomorrow – written with three women, Vania Santella, Federica Pontremoli and Francesca Marciano – unfolds on three intersecting levels, one of which is Giovanni's complicated private life. While his daughter Emma (Valentina Romani), composer of the music for her father's film, gets engaged to the over-seventy-year-old Polish ambassador (Jerzy Stuhr, who was in We Have a Pope [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Nanni Moretti
film profile]), his wife Paola (Margherita Buy), producer of the film together with the Frenchman Pierre (Mathieu Amalric), is planning to leave him after 40 years, and so has secretly rented a flat in which to take refuge and goes to a distracted psychoanalyst (Teco Celio) to find the courage. "Living with you is like walking forever on a tightrope," says the daughter to Giovanni to explain her mother's decision.

In a film in which he perpetuates the abandonment syndrome, Moretti flaunts with melancholic irony all the idiosyncrasies manifested in his cinema since the days of his first alter ego Michele Apicella, from the most innocuous to the most intransigent. The love of sweets, old songs, football and swimming in the pool, the hatred of female sabots, the banality of neo-language peppered with Anglicisms (see the meeting with Netflix representatives) and the ethical-aesthetic problem of violence in cinema to which he dedicates a beautiful monologue quoting Krzysztof Kieślowski's A Short Film About Killing and a long and amusing scene in which Giovanni bursts onto the set of the 'crime' film that his wife Paola is producing, even going so far as to leave a message on Martin Scorsese's answering machine. Cinema is continually and playfully called into question by Nanni: Arthur Penn's The Chase, with Marlon Brando, the cinema of John Cassavetes and above all his own films. In a nocturnal scene with Amalric, Giovanni circles Piazza Mazzini not on the Vespa from Dear Diary but on one of the ultra-modern electric scooters that now infest our cities. In the film's finale, which Giovanni wanted to be dramatic and instead resolves in a Fellinian manner into a parade of faces that Moretti has made popular, the past mingles with the future and what would seem to be a farewell is only a goodbye.

A Brighter Tomorrow is produced by Sacher Film and Fandango with Rai Cinema, in co-production with France's Le Pacte. Foreign sales are handled by Kinology.

(Translated from Italian)

Photogallery 25/05/2023: Cannes 2023 - A Brighter Tomorrow

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Nanni Moretti, Michele Eburnea, Margherita Buy, Mathieu Amalric, Barbora Bobulova, Sun-hee You
© 2023 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it