The Italian director premieres ‘The Sun of the Future’ 30 years after his most emblematic film, ‘Caro Diario (Dear Diary)’, which also returns to theaters
Italian director Nanni Moretti is double news these days. The next September 15 opens in Spain his latest film, ‘The sun of the future’, a reflection between tender and caustic on ideologies and cinema itself. and they are fulfilled 30 years of one of his most emblematic films, ‘Caro diario (Dear Diary)’, with his famous episode of the Vespa ride through the streets of Rome until he reached the place where the Pier Paolo Pasolini. This film returns to theaters next weekend.
I am not thinking of a specific, bourgeois, left-wing public. I think of an unknown audience in a dark room
The protagonist of ‘The Sun of the Future’, Giovanni, played by Moretti himself, is a film director anchored in certain ideas of the past and in conflict with those of the present. He is in the middle of filming his new film, and the stressful work on the set coincides with a crisis with his wife (Margherita Buy, with whom Moretti works regularly), the plight of the film’s French producer (Mathieu Amalric) and the estrangement with his daughter (Valentina Romani). Too many crises at once, combined with a completely new situation for him: his wife, who has produced all of his previous feature films, is now producing a film by a young director with whom Giovanni clashes regarding the use of violence in cinema.
The film that Giovanni shoots is set in Italy in the 50s. At the start of ‘The Sun of the Future’, a young man claims not to know that in that decade there were communists in Italy, and that he believed they were only in Russia. Historical forgetfulness. Moretti points out that the film “talks about the left in the 50s, which is very different from today. The left is still in an identity crisis in many countries. It does not seem to me that today it is so difficult to have positions on the left before a right so rude it even denies climate change”. In the film they are shooting, they talk about the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, perhaps a reflection of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukrainethe end of the communist idealism of yesteryear.
What bothers me as a director is when violence becomes a consumer product.
Giovanni assures in fiction that when he makes a film he does not think of the public, although he is not sure if that is true. Does Moretti think of the viewer? “I don’t think of an audience specific, bourgeois, left. I think of an unknown public that is in a dark room ready to watch a movie on the big screen. I don’t think about those who watch movies on a mobile.”
In another sequence from the imagined film, Giovanni and his lead actress argue. She wants to improv like John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands did. Moretti reflects on her evolution: “When I started in the cinema, I had considerable rigidity when directing the performers. Now I see it differently. I feel empathy for the actors, I am very close to them. 40 years ago I saw them more as pawns in a game”. Moretti announces that next October he will make his debut in the theater, only as a director.
One of the best moments of ‘El sol del futuro’ is an ironic and highly imaginative reflection on how violence is reflected in contemporary cinema. “I don’t say no to violence in a movie, I’m not at all a fundamentalist against its use,” says Moretti, and remember that “a film like ‘Taxi Driver’ is violent and beautiful, some Brian De Palma movies too, the recent ‘Holy spider’, about a serial killer, is also very beautiful. What bothers me as a director is when violence becomes a consumer product.” Scorsese plays a very funny role in this sequence.
Moretti makes his portrait of the Italian political situation and comments that there may be analogies with the Spanish one: “Until 1994, when Berlusconi came to power, a voter from the Christian Democrats and one from the Italian Communist Party could talk to each other, their parties had participated in the resistance and wrote the anti-fascist constitution. Since 1994 that dialogue is no longer possible. The discourse of current Italian politicians arises from the influence of Berlusconi, our politicians no longer have memory & rdquor;.
In ‘The sun of the future’ he quotes Cassavetes, Scorsese, ‘La dolce vita’, ‘The swimmer’, Aretha Franklin, the Blues Brothers, Kieslowski and his film ‘You will not kill’, all well embedded in a rather curious film within a film story, since Moretti assures that as a spectator he does not like this type of film and that every day it is more difficult for him to explain his work. “I realized at the end of the film that it is about a great act of love towards the cinema that can be seen in a movie theater, and an act of trust towards the public that is going to see it. After the pandemic, and with the crisis, people have gotten used to watching movies at home, but I think that a film projected in a theater continues to retain a great power of fascination,” concludes the filmmaker.