Nanni Moretti
Sogni D'Oro

In the filmography of every respectable cinema auteur, there must be an underrated title, or at least one that hasn’t reached the popularity of the previous works, whether due to poor distribution, the controversial nature of the work, or the excessive quality of the director’s other productions. Faced with a film like "Sogni d'oro" by Nanni Moretti, I really don't know which of the three hypotheses to support, especially when I seriously consider the third one, which frankly seems utterly stupid to me because it’s improbable.

After two cult films like the super 8 "Io sono un autarchico" (1976) and "Ecce Bombo" (1978), Moretti continues with his exploration of the tics and frustrations of a generation that seems distant today but is actually much more similar to ours than it appears. And he does it using cinema as a tool for self-analysis; here, the protagonist Michele Apicella is a young filmmaker who detests debates, his mother, psychoanalysis, TV games, and aspiring directors. During his lectures, he is constantly attacked by a self-proclaimed critic (who always appears under different identities) who reproaches him for the difficulty of his way of making cinema, incomprehensible to simple people like "a farmer from Lucania, a shepherd from Abruzzo, and a housewife from Treviso." He is harassed by two strange brothers who force him to hire them as assistant directors for the film he is working on, "La Mamma di Freud." It is the story of a madman who has not overcome the Oedipus complex, convinced he is Sigmund Freud. The film progresses following three paths: the private life of the director intent on making his film, the film within the film, and the dream dimension. In the latter, Michele is a Literature professor in love (but unrequited) with one of his students who reproaches him for his unorthodox methods.

It would be easy to dismiss "Sogni d'Oro" in a few words; 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.

In the early 80s, Berlusconi flooded Italy with phone calls to learn about people's viewing habits and preferences of the time, leading to the creation of a series of escape programs in a time slot that many years later would be defined as "prime time." Crisis of cinema and the advent of regional televisions, first steps of trash. From here, in some way, arises the criticism of the "chameleon" of debates: the housewife and the average Italian, in general, preferred television more than cinema, as the film industry would, in a few years, go awry, with productions of the lowest quality. Here Moretti anticipates the dark period of the 80s and the collapse of television entertainment (we are just in 1981!) which was already quite evident. He also finds time to make his character Michele Apicella even more neurotic (not coincidentally the then-unknown Remo Remotti proposed his little script "La Mamma Di Freud" to him) and immerse everything in a dreamlike and confusing dimension (the dream sequences).

In the latter emerges the lived experience, where Moretti's family members are mostly professors and therefore represent the joy (or disappointment) of not belonging to that category which was initially imposed on him.

The style is still the same, naive (and it will not evolve much in the remaining titles of Moretti's filmography), but unique; a visually insignificant direction, the Roman director confirms his talent with magical touches of screenplay and serious themes wrapped in a grotesque comedy.

A film for few, unmissable for fans of the director.