1976: Lo sono un autarchico (I Am Self-sufficient) (+producer, scenarist/scriptwriter, role). 1978: Ecce bombo (+scenarist/scriptwriter, role). 1981: Sogni director'oro (Sweet Dreams) (+scenarist/scriptwriter, role). 1984: Bianca (co-scenarist/scriptwriter, +role). 1985: La massa e finita (The Mass Is Ended) (co-scenarist/scriptwriter, +role). 1989: Palombella rossa (Red Lob) (co-scenarist/scriptwriter, +role). 1990: La cosa (The Thing) (documentary) (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 1993: Isole (+scenarist/scriptwriter, role). 1994: Caro Diario (Dear Diary) (+co-producer, scenarist/scriptwriter, role). 1997: Aprile (+scenarist/scriptwriter, role).
1988: Domani accadra (It'll Happen Tomorrow) (Luchetti) (producer). 1991: Il portaborse (The Factotum; The Yes Man) (Luchetti) (co-producer, role). 1995: La seconda volta (The Second Time) (Calopresti) (co-producer, role). 1996: Trois vies et une seule mort (Three Lives and Only One Death) (Ruiz) (role).
Made his first amateur film, La sconfitta, 1973; directed additional amateur films Pate de bourgeois, 1973, and Come parli frate, 1974, shot on Super 8mm, which were screened in local cine-clubs and amateur festivals; directed first feature, Sono un autarchico, 1976; started production company, Sacher Films, and an art house cinema, Nuovo Sacher, which screens independent films from across the globe.
Special Jury Prize, Berlin Festival, for The Mass Is Ended, 1986; Best Director, Cannes Festival, for Caro Diario, 1994.
Brunico, Bolzano, Italy, 19 August 1953.
Self-taught.
Most Americans have never heard of Nanni Moretti, an Italian-born director-comedian who made his first film in 1973 at age twenty and has been a regular on the international film festival circuit since the early 1980s. This lack of recognition is not without irony, since his style of visually refined physical humor may be linked to the comic techniques of some of America's most beloved funnymen (including Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and the Marx Brothers). But Moretti's cinematic concerns involve much more than making his audiences laugh. He has been compared to Woody Allen in that both filmmakers have intellects, and both fill their work with philosophical deliberations.
Moretti is especially concerned with the political situation in his country, and the manner in which politics and politicians affect the lives of citizens. Palombella rossa is a typical Moretti film: both an off-the-wall satire and a pensive allegory about the choices, both personal and political, an individual makes in his life. It is the story of Michele, a character who often appears in Moretti's films in different guises (and is played by the filmmaker). By 1990s' standards, Michele is an anachronism in that he is a staunch communist. He also is a politician and a water-polo player. Much of the film is set during a water-polo match in which Michele constantly debates the merits of his politics with various individuals, from his teenaged daughter to journalists and political activists. All the while, the screen version of Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak's contemplation of communism, airs on a nearby TV set. There also are flashbacks to Michele's youth. He is shown to be haunted by the more painful of his childhood memories, which adds insight into his present-day character.
Despite all this, Michele primarily is a comical creation. In his first appearance on screen, he drives his car and trades funny faces with some children in the back seat of the auto in front of him. This diversion results in his crashing into another car, causing a brief bout of amnesia that sets the stage for the goings-on during the water-polo match.
On one level, Palombella rossa serves as an examination of the state of communism in Italy; the athletic contest slowly degenerates into chaos, which may be seen as a reflection of the political state of Italy. But one thing is clear: Moretti is lampooning all political theorists and blowhards, those who are pro- or anti-communist/fascist/capitalist but who end up becoming tangled in their own rhetoric. And even more specifically, the film serves as his shout of despair for the collapse of communism and the corruption of the true, ideologically pure communist objective: a fair and equitable economic system in which all people, rather than certain individuals, might thrive.
Moretti also overtly deals with politics in his first feature, I Am Self-Sufficient, in which he spoofs the totalitarian ideal while chronicling the goings-on in a theater group; he also appears as an actor in Daniel Luchetti's ll Portaborse, an impassioned assault on corruption within Italy's Socialist party. In his other films, however, Moretti focuses on additional issues with which he is intrigued. In The Mass Is Over, a speculation on the meaning of love, he plays a young cleric whose sense of priestly duty is jarred by the fact that his predecessor had broken his vows.
Moretti further spotlights this theme in Bianca, in which he plays a high school mathematics teacher who is consumed by the idea of romantic love. In this film, Moretti also drolly scrutinizes Europeans' fixation with American pop culture, as his teacher is employed in the ?Marilyn Monroe? alternative high school, where each classroom comes complete with a jukebox. In the autobiographical Sweet Dreams, he plays a filmmaker who shares a complex relationship with his mother. As he is lauded by those who desire to collaborate with him on future projects and censured as a fraud by those put off by his opinions, Moretti reflects on the varied manner in which he is viewed as a filmmaker.
Moretti's most widely distributed film to date is Caro Diario. It is divided into three distinctly personal sections, each of which mirrors the director's concerns about his culture and, ultimately, his own survival. In the first, Moretti rides around Rome on a Vespa and makes off-the-wall observations about what he sees and feels. He pronounces that he is obsessed with Jennifer Beals, of Flash Dance fame. This plays itself out on screen with the sudden appearance of Beals, who just so happens to be on the same street as Moretti at that very moment; as a cinematic effect, this also coincides with the manner in which Woody Allen employed Marshall Mc Luhan in Annie Hall. Moretti also savages pompous film critics who know nothing of real life, and who extol such films as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and he ponders why he has never visited the spot where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered.
In Part 2, Moretti goes island-hopping in Southern Italy. Here, he spotlights the same concerns he had dealt with earlier in Bianca, and ponders a most relevant contemporary question: How long can a man exist without a television set? Part 3 is the most serious segment. Here, Moretti restages his own cancer treatment. A sequence he filmed as he readied himself for a real chemotherapy treatment precedes re-enactments of him enduring uncomfortable itches and visiting numerous doctors. Each one offers different diagnoses. Each one hands him prescriptions for different pills, and the poor guy ends up with so many that he could open his own drugstore. Once again, Moretti manages to joke about a most serious situation, and in doing so pulls off quite a feat: finding humor in his own mortality.?ROB EDELMAN