Nanni Moretti
Ecce Bombo

Is there anything more desolate than the Ostia seafront? Not that things have changed much since 1978. We wear different clothes, drive bigger cars governed by electronics, make phone calls without tripping over wires, but those who know how to detach themselves from a life aimed at home and family with two children playing on the floor protected by a permanent contract deposited with a nearby company to retire, those who do so are not yet at all confident about the future of the human race. Those who think are almost always pessimistic. But why? In '78 among those who thought there was Nanni Moretti, here young and with long hair, who entrusts his alter-ego Michele Apicella with the task of describing a disheartening generation of '68ers emptied of all strength and ideals, lazy, defeated and tired. A bit like the summer heat when you’re in the city. There's no real plot, no story worth following, it's a cinema of fragments: fragments of Rome, anonymous and solitary, devoid of any reference to the much-celebrated Roman landmarks on other occasions, Rome that here could be any other suburb of Italy in summer; fragments of Michele, critical and socially maladjusted, Mirko, anguished, Vito and Goffredo, both letting the days pass listlessly, Cesare, married and cuckolded, idle friends who kill time between a silent evening at the bar and sessions of self-analysis in which they tell each other, record themselves, examine their positions without ever reaching a conclusion, and when they don’t know what to do they improvise, always confused, go to see the sunrise without realizing that it rises behind them. What do we want? What do we do? I do things, I see people. But what? Who? Where? We're unhappy, but why?

Michele conducts a ruthless analysis (and as far as possible away from current topics) of a young world in which he is also immersed, the outbursts of his frustration are directed at the only cushioned environment where he is sure he can bounce: the four domestic walls, solid castle of incommunicability. Michele, however, in the end, is the only one to keep the promise to visit Olga to remain silent in front of her, while others eat watermelons or get lost in the streets of a Rome never so dead, an ideal theater of horrors. Certain films can only be seen in summer. Today, as yesterday, young people shoot at dogs, set fire to the homeless, become monsters to conquer boredom. We are heading towards a future we've always seen as dystopian in old science fiction stories, controlled everywhere by big brothers, spoiled by technology that doesn’t even let us leave the house to shop, chilled by screens in human relationships, neighborhood patrols for increasingly limiting security, speed cameras and cameras at every traffic light, supermen as points of reference. When one wanted to depict such a future, decades ago, objects, buildings, cars were given a rounded shape, everything represented with smoothed angles to seem distant; now I look at a photo of an Alfa 33 and a Giulietta, and the direction of evolution appears clear to me. We were terrified of that future but we are plunging headlong into it. Yet I am sure, it hasn’t always been like this, and it is the reason why I enjoy the few times I talk to my father, his Venetian Redentore festival when he was 14 and jumped from one boat to another, when he sold milk in Monza and entered the villas of the rich that line the park, his fifteen months in the army when he returned home only three times because he was having too much fun. Some indulge in pessimism because they feel good there, not me.

At night, often, I go for a walk around the neighborhood, especially on these summer evenings when the house seems less a refuge and more a cage; I pass by open bars with people outside sitting at tables placed on the sidewalks, by night parking lots with the desolate coats of the guards, the automatic tobacconists displaying the 24-hour machines, I pick up what I can of the conversations I cross at tram stops, at stops, at meeting points. The word I catch most often is "crisis". The husband talks about it to the wife, the wife to the husband, the friend to the friend, the friend to the friend, the friend to the friend, the boyfriend to the girlfriend, the dad to the godson. I open a news page and find that Italy is eighth in the list of countries at risk of bankruptcy, as if it were a race. Crisis, could it be your fault for all this pessimism that invades the streets?

Yet in '78 you weren’t there, it was the years of lead and perhaps you had other forms, you disguised yourself later, but you’re still and always a fashion, you’re a hairdresser’s conversation topic, like football articles or the latest movie watched. At my hairdresser tomorrow, after talking about Inter, I will try to talk about "Ecce bombo", maybe I'll even succeed better.