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A Brighter Tomorrow
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There is much in A Brighter Tomorrow (2023) that suggests it is intended primarily as a gift from Nanni Moretti, in his 70th year, to his faithful fans – for it is full-to-bursting with recollections of his earlier work, to the point of becoming a self-anthology film. There is the image, made iconic by Caro diario (1993), of Moretti racing around on his Vespa – which even became the logo of his production company – but with the vehicle now transformed, in the 21st century, into an electric scooter. There are sessions of psychoanalysis, as in The Son’s Room (2001). There is the basic situation of a director making a film, as in Mia madre (2015); or Moretti himself imagining scenes from a yet-to-be realised project, as in Aprile (1998). There are the jokes about the difficulties of international co-production (Mia madre), updated to the era of Netflix’s streaming domination. And where, in Caro diario, Moretti once visited the bedroom of a film critic to torment him over his irresponsible praise of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), here he abruptly halts the staging of a brutal, stereotypical execution scene in order to give the director, cast and crew (including his wife Paola, played by Margherita Buy) a prolonged, haranguing masterclass in the ethics and aesthetics of screen violence. Above all, A Brighter Tomorrow returns to the political themes that have often preoccupied Moretti in films including Palombella rossa (1989) and Il caimano (2006). Like many Italian artists (such as, in cinema, Bernardo Bertolucci or the Taviani brothers – for whom Moretti acted in Padre padrone [1977]), he has an abiding concern with the history and fate of the Italian Communist Party (the PCI). Two events especially mark the lingering ‘leftist melancholia’ characteristic, to this day, of Italian culture: the death of beloved PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti in 1964; and the strong disapproval among Italian communists toward the Soviet Union’s bloody suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. (A curious phenomenon: how so much Italian cinema divides its political vision between noble-but-ailing communism and deluded-and-co-opted terrorism, with hardly any exploration, even in fictional-imaginary terms, of the vast post-‘60s Autonomist movements in-between.) It is the latter milestone of Hungary ‘56 that forms the basis of the film that Giovanni (Moretti) is making in A Brighter Tomorrow, about a local Party newspaper interacting with a visiting Hungarian circus troupe – although a sardonic final text printed on screen, hailing Italy’s “communist Utopia of Marx and Engels which still makes us so happy today”, hints at a deeper, unresolved disenchantment on Moretti’s part with all political systems. In the meantime, Giovanni’s gesture as an engaged but idealistically dreamy filmmaker amounts to banning all imagery of Stalin from the décor of his movie. If there is a fault line or central split in Moretti’s cinema, it is between, precisely, the tendency to social disenchantment, versus the desire to discover (or rediscover) individual enchantment – the pleasures of everyday life. That is why the spirit of Federico Fellini looms large over A Brighter Tomorrow, in its structure, its direct citations (a clip from La Dolce Vita included), its rousing Nino Rota-like music score (by Franco Piersanti), and its circus imagery. Life – as bittersweet as it may eventually prove to be – is also a party, so let’s dance and laugh together while we still can. A Brighter Tomorrow is, for Moretti, an overflowingly cinephilic enterprise. Beyond the abundant Fellini references, there are namechecks of Kieślowski, Scorsese, Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966), Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961 – Giovanni has a ritual of watching it with his family whenever a new project begins) and, more allusively, Truffaut (the incessant-question-answering motif from Day for Night [1973] is recreated), and Frank Perry’s adaptation of John Cheever’s short story in The Swimmer (1968 – Giovanni despairs that he’s now too old for the central role in his planned remake). However, the most central reference, tossed off during a disastrous meeting between Giovanni, Paola and Netflix representatives, is to the Tavianis’ St Michael Had a Rooster (1972) – which culminates in the kind of heroic, existential, politically noble suicide that Giovanni has scripted for his own leading man (Silvio Orlando as Ennio). Of course, Giovanni is on the wrong path. For he is the typical Moretti character: blocked, self-deluded, locked into repetition of old habits, unfailingly prickly and neurotic. (The Son’s Room offers the tenderest look at this type.) He’s an authoritarian on the set who forecloses the enthusiasm that his co-leading actor (Barbora Bobul’ová as Vera) has for John Cassavetes’ method – and he doesn’t even see that she and Ennio are falling in love. His sense of ethics has curdled, despite his presumed counter-cultural past, into crusty moralism: hence his shock and disapproval at the romance of his daughter Emma (Valentina Romani) with a much older, Polish man (Jerzy Stuhr, familiar from Kieślowski’s cinema, whose own films owe an avowed debt to Moretti) – a delightful thread which provides an echo of the dilemmas of interpersonal ‘appropriateness’ explored in the unfairly bashed Tre piani (Three Floors, 2021). Not only typical, Giovanni may well be the ultimate, most hung-up figure of this type in Moretti’s cinema: he’s an emotional cripple en route to marital divorce, creative breakdown, complete paralysis and, very possibly, premature death. Emma is shocked to learn how long he has been taking anti-depressant medication. And Giovanni grasps his problems almost too late. A Brighter Tomorrow takes this tendency to its logical conclusion: while staging his communist alter ego in the act of committing suicide (who by noose … ), Giovanni begins to play the scene himself – perhaps in somber recollection of Nicholas Ray’s lacerating self-portrait in We Can’t Go Home Again (1973/2009). That’s the last possible moment at which he can change course. But how can the re-enchantment begin? That’s always Moretti’s question. In A Brighter Tomorrow, there is a wonderful scene of collective twirling, as if floating, that breaks the deadlock of Giovanni facing the bad, platitudinous scene on his production slate. This spectacle enters a chain of musical transitions (using a generous song list of pop classics) that serve as a near-surrealistic bridging device – something begun with the hauntingly graceful use of Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” in Mia madre. As an artist, Giovanni needs the inspiration and the impetus that music gives him – so he plays the songs in the car and on the set, and slowly everybody joins in, as if united by a miraculous act of magic. Fantasy – and its merging with reality – is a key element of A Brighter Tomorrow (as it is in Fellini), especially in the recurring scenes where Giovanni imagines (and directs) a typical ‘young couple in love’ who provide a phantasmic mirror of himself and Paola. There are things in the film that don’t work as well as the sing-alongs and the twirling. The near-universal massacre rained upon Tre piani seems to have pushed Moretti in an opposite, and somewhat strained, crowd-pleasing direction. Self-anthologies are hard to pull off, even for the best auteurs. The making-a-film-inside-the-film dispositif is inevitably a bit clunkily overdetermined, despite Moretti’s collaboration with three other screenwriters. Mathieu Amalric’s role as a bubbly French producer (real-life co-production alert!), hiding a desperate modus operandi in relation to financing, contains a nice plot revelation, but not much else. Many jokey scenes end on exclamatory, double-take, TV-type freezes/pauses that land quite awkwardly. Moretti’s own acting is not up to his Son’s Room/Mia madre best practice. And the final happy-ending parade (with its string of left-popular celebrities from various fields, such as actor Alba Rohrwacher and politician Claudio Morganti) is even less satisfying as a gesture of solidarity than the prolonged, paroxysmic red-flag-waving in Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976). It’s only the everyday gesture of walking, pounding the pavement step by step – and in step with everybody else – that, in time with Piersanti’s score, redeems it (somewhat) as cinema. © Adrian Martin 18 April 2024 |
