Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti calls out to the house of Europe

Fine analyst and columnist of the Italian company, Nanni Moretti, Palme d’or in 2001 with The son’s room, was absent from the charts this year. Faithful to its intimate angle, it evokes the break-up of a neighborhood community that reflects Italian society and, why not, Europe. If the message gets through, Moretti returns to a classic staging, previously more inventive.

A succession of domestic dramas plagues the neighborly relations of three families in a Roman building. Everyone is stubborn in their convictions within the couples, and the vindictiveness extends to the entire environment, going as far as breaking up. Over the course of ten years, will love return to homes, and will the desire to be neighbors take over?

After the great figures of Silvio Berlusconi in The Cayman and the pope in Habemus Papam, Nanni Moretti returns to characters closer to Italian society in Tre Piani. Perhaps this is where he strikes the right lines in his films, observer of an Italy which fascinates him and whose shortcomings he brushes in his films. He found material by transposing from Tel Aviv to Rome the novel by Eshkol Nevo (Three Steps, Gallimard), to which he gives European, if not universal, resonances.

A father denies his son who killed a passerby in a car, another is suspected of having abused his neighbor’s minor daughter, and a lonely mother takes in her husband’s hated brother. These intimate conflicts will escape from the family unit, and spread outside, in rumor, in police investigations, and in trials. They become news items, of society, they are put on the public square and go beyond the individual.

This passage from the private to the public finds an echo in a key scene, where Moretti films a demonstration in front of the premises of an association helping refugees in Italy. The three dramas of the film are based on an unacceptability of the other, the neighbor, the husband, the son. This rejection is like a fringe of Italy, Poland and Romania, which feel threatened by foreigners. England is not spared, and Brexit is a case in point. It is the same process which is in progress in the Roman building of Moretti. Metaphor in subtext of a Europe which cannot get along, Tre Piani ends on the note of hope for a possible reconciliation, at least to be created.

Kind : Drama
Director : Nanni Moretti
Actors : Nanni Moretti, Margherita Buy, Riccardo Scamarcio Sagna
Country : Italy / France
Duration : 1h59
Exit : November 10, 2021
Distributer : The pact

Synopsis : A series of events will radically transform the existence of the inhabitants of a Roman building, revealing their difficulty in being a parent, brother or neighbor in a world where resentment and fear seem to have got the better of living together. While the men are prisoners of their stubbornness, the women try, each in their own way, to mend these disunited lives and to finally transmit serenely a love that one would have thought to have disappeared forever …