In the middle of filming his new film, an Italian director is experiencing a major artistic and existential crisis. However, even though filming is going to hell and Paola, his wife of the last forty years, is preparing to leave him, the magic of cinema prevails. In the movie Towards a bright futurean affectionate “meta” satire that sees Italian director Nanni Moretti take on his own 8 1/2the border between reality and fiction is becoming more and more porous.
This means that with Towards a bright futurethe director of Personal diary and of Son’s room joins the ranks of these predecessors having sent a love letter to the seventh art through a film – or rather, a film within a film. It’s almost a genre in itself, and the tone varies depending on the author’s intentions.
So The American nightby François Truffaut, does he paint a more flattering portrait of the environment, worries included, than, for example, the scathing Contempt, by Jean-Luc Godard. Two masterpieces, however, like the aforementioned contribution by Federico Fellini.
If we cannot quite say the same about Nanni Moretti’s film, we must nevertheless recognize many qualities in it, and not the least, starting with a real desire for artistic introspection.
Moretti plays Giovanni, a director who is making, or trying to make, a historical drama about the role played by the Italian Communist Party in the 1956 Budapest Uprising: insert comment here about how “people » are no longer interested in important subjects.
In this regard, the film often has moralizing overtones: modern cinema is too violent, young people are uneducated (see this actor who understands nothing about History during the group reading, or this twenty-year-old director who is filming a thriller at the same time as Giovanni)… Thereupon, Nanni Moretti joins Denys Arcand, with the young demonstrators and other ignorant arts students of Will.
This tendency is, however, mitigated by a marked sense of self-deprecation, with Moretti portraying himself in an unflattering (but obviously adorable nonetheless) egocentric light. Even during the consultations between Paola (wonderful Margherita Buy, star of My mother) and his shrink, we only talk about Giovanni/Moretti.
Moments of grace
As usual with Moretti’s comedy, drama, even melodrama, is never far away: it is one of his signatures.
In terms of staging, and the subject obviously has something to do with it, Towards a bright future is undoubtedly Moretti’s most ambitious film. However, it is in intimacy, more than in grand display, that the moments of grace reside. The sequence where Giovanni enters the bubble of two young lovers who have just attended a screening of The good life (by Fellini, well) in order to “stage” their first kiss is a pure delight (there will be a “take 2” during a later jam).
Ditto for this passage to the Italian offices of Netflix, where Moretti’s alter ego attacks the now omnipotent concept of algorithm.
However, cohesion is not always there. We think of this impromptu musical number which occurs “in reality” and which turns out to be more charming in theory than in practice.
In any case, given the still evident passion of the director for his profession, we can be certain that this is not a clap end for Nanni Moretti.