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Rating:
He told us, and he was right.
This time, Apicella moves between dream and reality in an extremely bitter film from every point of view.
We are ONLY in 1981, yet in Michele's mind, everything is crystal clear: past, present, and future are regurgitated and literally "explained" in all their complexities.
Now as back then, social struggles are a vague memory. Students are no longer critical of teaching and teachers; they despise and completely ignore them! Being sent out of the classroom almost becomes a game.
The young are "dull" in the director's pessimistic view, no longer existentialists, no longer politicized, but indifferent before a screen (now as then) "lobotomized." The amusement arcades have already arrived, capturing the attention of the young, including Apicella himself, entangled in the same quicksand he himself revealed.
Another theme is the couple, the futuristic vision of a sexually and emotionally complicated and superficial world. A world in which sensitivity leads to abstinence to avoid the risk of suffering. The man, Michele, longs for the ideal woman, Silvia. He lives with his mother, a woman full of certainties and clichés... ex-feminist, ex-politicized, who is even beaten by him in a dimension halfway between dream and reality. Living with parents would later become a constant in the lives of today's youth who, deep down, feel comfortable and do whatever they want in the "hearth."
The analysis of the relationship with MOTHERS will play a fundamental role throughout the film. Even Freud becomes a caricature. Always in a "semi-dreamlike" setting, the director shoots a film about Freud (who even does infomercials).
Freud and Jung are wiped away by history (a pity to have spent millions of lire on it) due to the uselessness of dream interpretation. Not that we're better off now with cognitive behavioral or psychodynamic therapies.
The mother and the detachment from the maternal cord so longed for by psychologists and sociologists today seems perhaps one of the more irrelevant aspects of modernity.
It is the modern mothers who have abruptly detached from their children and now live, steeped in a thousand rivulets of remorse and regrets. Present!
Finally, we speak of the female figure in the future... If, for Nanni Moretti, a woman can be mother or muse, who have we women become in reality?
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By babymurdoc
It is not a transitional film as many have led to believe, but a firm point where Moretti moves determined to make a certain type of cinema, with ease and confidence.
The Roman director confirms his talent with magical touches of screenplay and serious themes wrapped in a grotesque comedy.
