Nanni Moretti is the Italian director who will always have a place in our hearts, not least for his masterly The Son’s Room (2001), in my view the greatest Cannes Palme d’Or winner of the century so far. And more recently his cinephile comedy Mia Madre (2015) was tremendous.
But his new film in competition is bafflingly awful: muddled, mediocre and metatextual – a complete waste of time, at once strident and listless. Everything about it is heavy-handed and dull: the non-comedy, the ersatz-pathos, the anti-drama.
It is effectively a film within a film, both as dull as each other. Moretti himself plays Giovanni, a high-minded film director with a failing marriage who is struggling to shoot his passion project about the Italian Communist party standing up to the Soviets over the Hungary invasion of 1956 – although a smirkingly ironic and evasive final title card indicates that A Brighter Tomorrow can’t even commit to deciding if all that was worth celebrating or not.
Giovanni’s wife and longtime co-producer Paola (Margherita Buy) is paying the household bills with a side hustle producing a crass gangster flick for a crude up-and-coming film-maker, and this pains Giovanni so deeply that he actually trespasses on location when this film’s grisly mob execution is about to be filmed and stops everything to lecture them on how crass it is and why what they’re doing isn’t as good as the murder scene in Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing. Is he supposed to be a shrill, self-important idiot who deserves to be booted off the set? Well no: this presumably is a comic hero whose unfashionably high standards and chaotic midlife angst are supposed to be adorable. Meanwhile, Paola is seeing a therapist and confesses she’s thinking of leaving him.
Mathieu Amalric phones in a grinning, sweaty performance as Giovanni’s dodgy producer Pierre, who is wheeler-dealing behind the scenes to raise the cash. There is a lot of perfunctory sub-Fellini circus business and a lot more peevish and redundant grumbling from Giovanni about the state of the cinema business today, featuring an easy-target scene in which Giovanni is forced to take a meeting with blockheaded Netflix suits who complain that his movie doesn’t have enough WTF moments. Actually this is one long WTF moment, for the wrong reasons.
There is also the now traditional scene in which an ageing cinephile attempts to show a classic movie to his teen kid who isn’t interested – although it’s incidentally pretty baffling that Giovanni goes on about his other idea, to make a movie version of John Cheever’s short story The Swimmer, without mentioning the classic Eleanor and Frank Perry version starring Burt Lancaster.
Moretti tries for some unearned sentimental endorsement by featuring classic Italian songs, and on the same everything-including-the-kitchen-sink basis, gives us a wacky walk-on from architect Renzo Piano in the Woody Allen/Marshall McLuhan style, and a final parade of movie-legend cameos which only make the film look blandly self-congratulatory. I’m sure the future will be brightened by another, better Moretti film – this one is best forgotten.
