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Rating: Only a year after Bianca, Nanni Moretti creates "The Mass is Over" (1985), a film in which for the first time he sheds the guise of his alter ego Michele Apicella to don the robes of a priest.
Don Giulio returns to his native Rome after a long stay on a small island. Initially hopeful of returning to his old life, he soon realizes that nothing has remained as he left it and as he hoped to find it. His family is falling apart: his father has gone to live with a friend of his daughter, his sister Valentina is leaving her fiancé from whom she is expecting a child she does not want to keep, his mother is in despair over the abandonment of her husband. Even the condition of his childhood friends disappoints and saddens him, while the suburban parish where Don Giulio is supposed to carry out his mission is abandoned, as the previous parish priest caused a scandal by getting married. Don Giulio tries in vain to be helpful to his relatives and friends, but oppressed by the malaise of others, by his impotence and inability to help those around him, he decides to leave for Patagonia where "there's a wind that drives you crazy."
From the very opening sequences of the film, it is clear that Don Giulio is none other than Michele Apicella in priestly attire: he is an unusual priest in whose behavior the mania and intolerance of Michele in earlier works, particularly in "Bianca," are found. As the director himself stated, "The Mass is Over" is not a film about priests: it does not intend to describe the ecclesiastical condition of contemporary Italy nor the religious crisis of our country. Instead, it is an intimately secular film that confronts viewers with the awareness that not even religion can provide answers to the drama of solitude nor to that of death. "It's sad to die without children": those were Michele's last words in "Bianca."
Don Giulio, still on the island, celebrates a wedding and admonishes the couple by recommending them three things: "mutual fidelity, the education of children, and mutual fidelity," revealing that the protagonist will have to face the same anxieties as Michele: the obsession with happy couples and the phobia of sexuality paralleled by the myth of family and mother, the inability to break away from childhood. The desire to take over others' lives and a normality that remains inaccessible to him is here justified by his being a priest, by the isolation imposed by his habit, and by his mission to partake in the sufferings of others, whereas in Bianca it took on the features of illness. Like Michele Apicella, Don Giulio is also incapable of compromise and of accepting others' unhappiness ("I believe life is made for happiness and not for pain"), while those around him seem to do everything to stay unwell and expect from him, by virtue of his role, understanding and forgiveness. His impotence in the face of the dramas of his friends and relatives leads him to withdraw into greater isolation and yield to the inability to communicate and to listen to the pain surrounding him.
Don Giulio seems unable to tolerate the reality that reveals itself to him and defends himself by using music, noises, or his own voice to cover words he does not want to hear. Thus, he screams so as not to hear his mother's crying, and, while his sister reads him a love letter from his father to his new companion, he progressively raises the volume of the radio until Bertè's voice completely overpowers Valentina's words, in a scene as intense as it is unpleasant in its bitterness. Don Giulio's moralism and intransigency prevent him from understanding and identifying with the lives of others and, more than Christian faith, it is his childish ideal of family that does not allow him to endure his sister's willingness to abort, his father abandoning his family for a much younger woman, the former parish priest who does not miss an opportunity to allude to his sexual life. Confronted with a painful reality that he cannot accept and that rejects him, Don Giulio finds his only refuge in regression to childhood, the only time in a man's life when happiness is tangible, materializing in "nogatine," the hot chocolate his mother used to buy him, the rubber balls he still keeps.
The stubbornness with which Don Giulio relates to others is that of a child and obstinately he wants to recover the vanished idyll of childhood. Faced with the disintegration of his family, he vainly seeks the realization of the Holy Family at the former parish priest's home: he claims his right to play with model trains, to play soccer with the parish boys, though he is left alone, lying on the sunlit field. Childhood is elsewhere, now unattainable.
Don Giulio-Michele will suffer the definitive tear from his childhood with the suicide of his mother, an unforgivable act that leaves him definitively alone ("Why did you do it? Now who will take care of me?" he will say in the touching monologue in front of the corpse). This event forces him to grow up and leave the nest of memory, representing one of the most important moments in Nanni Moretti's filmography. "The Mass is Over" marks a rupture in the filmmaker's production both in the decisive psychological evolution of his alter ego and in the choice of a more narrative structure and a more classical form of storytelling and staging. The at least formal abandonment of Michele Apicella's character helps the director to yield less to the self-referentiality and self-sufficiency of his previous works. Moretti's gaze broadens from his personal obsessions to embrace the theme of a universal condition of solitude, an irredeemable unhappiness, with less sarcasm and more desolation.
"Ti senti sola/con la tua libertà": Moretti's warning is that freedom does not exist in solitude. On the notes of "Ritornerai" by Bruno Lauzi, Don Giulio, in the final scene, smilingly watches for the last time his loved ones reconcile in a happy dance that is nothing more than a dream and hallucination.
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