No, auteur cinema is not dead. He just needs love, according to Nanni Moretti. And about love, the director of The Son’s Room, Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2001, has reservations in his heart and in his soul. “I am aware that today’s cinema is experiencing a crisis. The industry is nothing like it was when I started in the business [nearly 50 years ago]. But I refuse to make a pessimistic observation. I prefer to reaffirm the power and magic of cinema. An art that has always helped me live better. »
Towards a Bright Future (the original title, Il sol dell’avvenire, taken from an Italian resistance song, is more sarcastic, according to Moretti) tells the story of Giovanni, a renowned filmmaker who is making a film about the Communist Party Italian (PCI) in 1956. While a Hungarian circus sets up its big top near Rome, the Soviet army arrives in the streets of Budapest to kill the popular revolt against the communist regime. “For me, the Budapest uprising of 1956 represents a pivotal date,” says Moretti. I wondered what the future of the PCI would have been if its leaders had moved away from the Soviet bloc that year. »
Giovanni is a gruff, egocentric filmmaker, always out of step with those around him. He is incapable of feeling the least bit of the distress of his wife (Margherita Buy), and his attitude will also sound the death knell for his relationship. The actor-director also co-stars with Silvio Orlando and Mathieu Amalric, who plays a very unpredictable French producer.
There is a scent of nostalgia, political and existential, in Towards a Radiant Future. The nostalgia of Giovanni, an old boomer, facing his time which he struggles to grasp. And also a criticism of current commercial cinema, its gratuitous violence, its lack of meaning. But Giovanni will bring his project to fruition. And will direct one of the most beautiful finales we have seen in cinema since… 8 ½!
Towards a Bright Future gives the impression that 1956 marks the beginning of the end of the great utopias. Like a missed appointment with History.
The 70-year-old filmmaker creates a film that is both funny and melancholy. As his look.
A hilarious scene, often commented on since the film’s release at Cannes, shows Giovanni in a meeting with three Netflix employees. The trio keeps telling the director that Netflix is streaming “190 COUNTRIES.” He gives him bogus advice on the dramatic arc of his film. He talks to him about scriptwriting laws, like adding a “what the fuck moment”! With humor, Moretti thus illustrates his refusal to give in to the sirens of the market.
“Platforms work well for series. I’m a subscriber and I watch it, says the director. But I write screenplays thinking about people having a common experience in a crowded room. I need to imagine an audience of strangers, in a dark room, watching images larger than themselves on a giant screen. Not on a tablet or phone on the subway. Furthermore, when you see a film at the cinema, you talk about it with your friends when you leave; we think about it for several days. Whereas a film that you watch alone on your phone is quickly forgotten. »
In Towards a Radiant Future, the protagonists refer to classics: The Swimmer by Frank Perry, Lola by Jacques Demy, Tu neras point by Kieślowski, La Dolce Vita by Fellini, the “improvised” cinema of John Cassavettes. Why these movie buff winks?
Moretti is sometimes compared to the director of Annie Hall, he is said to be the “Woody Allen of Italian cinema”. Does the comparison flatter him? “It suits me, yes… Except that Woody Allen, in his good years, made one film a year. » (Moretti has directed 16 feature films, documentaries and short films.)
With a traveling circus, a director who shoots a film within a film, fanfare music by Franco Piersanti, who was already Nino Rota’s assistant, Moretti also pays a vibrant tribute to Fellini and his masterpiece 8 ½. His film also makes us nostalgic for the golden age of Italian cinema, at the time when a film could make us dream and cry… while talking about politics and class struggle.
