Nanni Moretti
Bianca (1984)

When I was younger, I wasn't very fond of Nanni Moretti because I fell into his narcissistic provocation. Nowadays, the annoyance of the past has gone, and I extract from his filmography this Italian-style thriller that couldn't be more so, a film that is very dear to me for the spectrum of human airs it throws into the field. And I mean that ancient air that all the characters have, that decadent Mediterranean breeze that makes the soul we are feel comfortably at ease.

Things are created psychically, things are resolved psychically, even murder cases. Each of the actors has their own logical solution to things, in their absurd evolutions there is truth, and it's recognized by bringing compassion instead of judgment. Bianca, the students, the families, the couples, Siro, the school principal: "Do I laugh?"

Psychosis, neuroses, traumas, hallucinations, decadent like life and death, in ramblings to pass the time, to stop Eternity, to deceive oneself that around the corner happiness will await us, to reach it and refuse it out of fear of losing it in the case of Michele. It's the pain of the rational imposition of happiness, it's the pain of the shipwreck of the hope of "who knows maybe one day I too..." that condemns us to continue, it's the pain of seeing others reject it, it's the pain of the fear that happiness may never come.

The stench of the putrefaction of love becomes unbearable, we are condemned to disinfect everything with alcohol, even our feelings, occasionally digging to "spy" through the window at a happy family that projects the hope of participating in the Kingdom of God. But Kronos is relentless if you engage in his game and erases the moment, erases the immobility of the stars. Arrogance dissolves in the despair of not being able to intervene psychically to fix things, so one opts for the solution of continuous material control, elimination included: "If you can't stop happiness, I will, the math teacher will pull up everyone's socks."

The obsession with "everything in place, everything in order" leads to wanting to dust off everyone's windowsill in search of an impossible empathy that can only disappoint us. The search by others for diversification to nourish the insidious suggestion of our boredom has the consequence of betraying the teamwork of a celestial centering that throws Michele into an isolationism of all identical loafers, perfectly ironed blue uniforms, cataloged feelings, sacred movements in eating cakes as if from the way the spoon slices the cake, one could decide the continuation or collapse of a Galaxy.

And we stay in the "tunnel" orphaned even of that horror vacui spread on bread like Nutella. Not convinced of the "half I do, half God does," distrustful of the divine's foresight, we abandon ourselves in the finale to the redemption that "confesses" Michele's level leap where a checkered sun will remain faithful to him.

Nanni Moretti constructs the portrait of the ultimate serial killer, the most unsettling ever, and the unease we have is for that sense of proximity we feel for Michele because, as Bianca says, "he is a good man" who, linear in his logic, in his solitary purity transcends the act: a good man who kills.

And how do you surpass a Hollywoodian troglodytic murder, with all those decisiveness-driven, absolutist serial killers, sure in their mission as avenger angels where Michele wipes them out presenting a real horror, paralyzing in the absence of fear, of an insecure and good "terminator" connected with a personal foresight to eternity, which in the long run convinces with its veiled objectivity, so the commissioner, having an important soul age, results light-years away from all those other detectives, commissioners, and various Sherlocks in literature and cinema with their peacock feathers.

In our commissioner, there is no vanity, no regard, this allows him to probe the unprobeable and indirectly suggest to the professor to surrender to the life sentence of the dilemma of where the limit of omnipotence begins and ends, with the prospect of citrusy conversations excluding judgments and reproaches. Solitudes must comfort each other.

I look at my photos from the '70s when I was a child and wore those blue sandals with two holes on top during summer. Even thanks to them, I had a beautiful childhood.

"It's sad to die without children."