Nanni Moretti’s new film has the effect of a beautiful and warm reunion with an old comrade. Both funny and melancholy, joyful and nostalgic, Toward a Radiant Future is first and foremost a plea for the magic (and survival) of auteur cinema. An art that the Italian director sees as the ultimate utopia of our crazy century.
Twenty years after Diary, which won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, Moretti returned to his favorite genre, autofiction. At 70, he has not lost his verve, in this satire which is also intended to be an object of resistance to the omnipotence of blockbusters, algorithms and platforms.
A gruff and egocentric character, but also endearing, Giovanni, Moretti’s alter ego, takes refuge in a comforting past with a feature film project on the Italian Communist Party in 1956 (Silvio Orlando, one of the actors in the film in the film, is wonderful). Obviously more comfortable in the past and fiction than in the present and reality, the filmmaker refuses to see the crisis his couple is going through (superb Margherita Buy who plays his wife and producer).
Toward a Bright Future critiques current society and the commercialization of cinema with platforms like Netflix. Moretti pays homage to 8 1/2 and Fellini, The Swimmer and the films of Cassavetes and Kieślowski. We could criticize him for his nostalgia for a time that moviegoers under 20 don’t want to know… But the director knows how to offer luminous twists and turns; his vision of art and life remains hopeful.
There are several memorable scenes in Bright Future. Giovanni’s meeting with Netflix “executives” who, in a Newspeak both absurd and disturbing, give him advice on cinema. The scene where he rides an electric scooter through the streets of Rome, with his producer (Mathieu Amalric); the one where Moretti begins the hit song Sono Solo Parole, first solo, then as a duet, then in chorus with his film crew. Finishing with a vibrant MOTOR! As if to remind us that cinema is images, sound and light, but also action!
