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Rating: [Contains plot spoilers]
Nanni Moretti recounts with extreme depth the concept of death and its ripple effect on life, the slow fading of a mother, and the parallel stagnation of all family members' lives. The reading of the tragic moment is both visceral and lucid; immediate and direct, yet equally complex and subtle. The concepts are developed in a complex yet precise web, addressing the loss of meaning without getting lost in its own theme.
Death reverberates on life: it shatters the analytical abilities of the director and daughter Margherita, paralyzes the strict rationality of the other son Giovanni. The symbolic conceptual discourse goes further: death transfigures into the essence of failure, the refusal to face life's matters. The niece Livia rejects Latin, the film star Barry Huggins rejects the script. The film portrays an absolute existential stasis: it is objective and factual in the children's crises, but is also a germ that corrodes the interpretative and intellectual capacities of the protagonists, who then project their inner death onto the objects of their observations. Margherita no longer accepts anything and sees everything negatively, Ada herself progressively loses clarity and even detaches from old friends.
A slow dying corrodes every logical foundation of the diegetic fabric of life and thus also of cinema. The film within the film is chaotic, fragmented, as incomprehensible as the lives of the film's protagonists in this tragic situation. The inability to mediate with the concept of death parallels the director's inability to clearly interpret the drama of the economic crisis; Barry Huggins does not understand his character and must continually ask for clarifications because the director's script itself is confused, indecisive, opaque. Margherita rejects confrontation and dialogue with the harmful forces of existence.
Thus, when Margherita opens her eyes and begins to process her grief, the trajectory of the film within the film also becomes clearer: the workers refusing to come to terms with the new owner parallel Margherita finally stopping to deny and remove the looming death of her mother. The message is then the necessity of courage in facing negativity head-on, without accepting palliatives, vain hopes, or momentary consolations that hide the abyss.
Little Livia no longer thinks about leaving classical high school and starts studying, Margherita realizes her negative attitude towards others and attempts to correct herself, suddenly finding herself accepting the performances of the actor she previously disparaged; Ada, who previously couldn't even take three steps, ends her life with a moment of pride, staying at home and doing what she loved most, explaining Latin.
The final perspective is doubly positive: death does not end the good Ada did, which is testified by her former students, and indeed crystallizes its impact; furthermore, the cut can only open a new season of life, which does not have to be necessarily worse. Every end is also a new beginning, like T. S. Eliot's cruel April that breeds Lilac from dead land.
The concept of placing the character alongside the actor also returns in certain places: in the film's web of references, this phrase could allude to Pirandello's concept of us playing a part. The protagonists, faced with trauma, shed their characters' roles and reveal their essence, their id. The actors behind the mask emerge with their truths: Margherita at the press conference can only think about her private matters that are weighing her down. Barry says he is tired of cinema's pretense.
The film is rich in symbols and internal references: besides those already mentioned, the image of Margherita trying to stem the water flooding the house with newspapers is very effective, like holding back death with insignificant mental tools. The gas bills that can't be found become a metaphor for the progressive detachment between the daughter and the mother and between the mother and life.
In this picture, Giovanni is a dissonant element: he does not show a path of progressive awareness, we do not see his awareness of pain. He seems very lucid and disenchanted from the beginning, but instead, his uprooting from life is the most serious. Expectation becomes a definitive detachment from work. However, we cannot fully understand the causes: Giovanni remains inscrutable, his acceptance of death is not the result of a process, it is inherent to his person, but perhaps precisely because of this, it does not have in itself the fertility that prompts new vital growth. Perhaps his acceptance of death is devoid of contrasts and thus cannot germinate new life.
The refusal and removal on one side, the passive acceptance on the other: between these two poles lies the only fruitful path, that of a courageous confrontation with life's evil, which, if it cannot be conquered, can always reconvene into new vital sprouts that take root on soil previously frozen by snow, and perhaps because of this, purified.
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