Nanni Moretti
Il sol dell'avvenire

"All the movies made today are right-wing/if they're boring, they're left-wing" sang Giorgio Gaber about thirty years ago. Yet, this film, openly left-wing in a right-shifted Italy, is not boring. Certainly, it's not Moretti at his best, but given that his recent works seemed somewhat unfocused to me (see "Three Floors"), this "Il sol dell'avvenire" seems like a Moretti, if not completely found, certainly refreshed.

The plot, without spoilers, involves a director who is putting together a film he's not convinced about, set in 1950s Italy during the Hungarian revolution, featuring a little man (Silvio Orlando) heading a PCI section in the Quarticciolo area of Rome (the same area where recently a brutal assault on an Indian man took place) torn between obedience to the party and the growing discontent among the members. In the present, there's a couple's crisis between the director (Moretti) and his wife (Margherita Buy).

The film is self-referential in many parts, the main character is Moretti's portrait of himself, and in the long run, the tics and neuroses of this complex director might become tedious, just as the reflections on Italy of the past (better?) and today (worse?) don't fully convince. But some sequences are masterful because with this film, Moretti seems to have wanted to get rid of not one, but many pebbles in his shoes. The long sequence where Moretti tries to explain to a young director that what he's filming, a sort of coarse "Gomorrah," is not cinema and he should take inspiration from Kieslowski (citing "A Short Film About Killing") is met with open-scene applause. As well as the very amusing attack on Netflix, which refuses to produce Moretti's film because it lacks the "what a fuck."

Occasionally, there are too many references to other cinema (the Woody Allen of "Annie Hall" in the brief appearance by Renzo Piano) and the ending, which someone has called Fellini-esque, is akin to Bertolucci's "1900," but it's not a summation of Moretti's cinema (even if the jokes about clogs are very Moretti-style), it is, perhaps, the film of a man trying to ask himself what the real meaning of cinema is today, what purpose does it have today, in this era of TV series all so flat and similar to each other, to still focus on the object of cinema and what sense his cinema has today. Perhaps retro, but still sharp. And the mash-up of private life and work appears as cohesive as in the most poignant "My Mother" (2015).

Actors in a state of grace (including an Orlando who says "I couldn't wait to play a character who hangs himself") and many familiar faces that towards the end create a nostalgic but not tearful mosaic. And the final frame is taken by Moretti ideally greeting the audience.