TO one day after the release of The sun of the future Rai 3 proposes tonight at 21.25 the penultimate film Nanni Moretti: Three floors. The least Morettian of the director’s films is the transposition of book by Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo. A beautiful text which, according to many critics, Moretti did not honor.
Three floors: the plot from Tel Aviv to Rome
The three stories that make up the novel are set in Tel Aviv and tell the three planes of the human psyche: id, ego and superego. Moretti transfers them to Rome Prati, and the three floors of the personality reflect those of a bourgeois condominium. On the ground floor live Lucio (Riccardo Scamarcio), his wife Sara (Elena Lietti) with their seven-year-old daughter, Francesca (Chiara Abalsamo).
The child is often given into the custody of two elderly neighbors who occasionally babysit her: Giovanna (Anna Bonaiuto) and Renato (Paolo Graziosi). One day the old man and the little girl disappear and the father suspects that Renato has molested his daughter.
Elena Vietti and Riccardo Scamarcio.
To the foreground, there are Monica (Alba Rohrwacher) and Giorgio (Adriano Giannini). He travels a lot for work and she often feels bored and scared alone because she fears one day becoming like her mother, hospitalized for mental disorders. Slowly Giorgio will understand that he has to be close to his family.
Finally, on the second floor resides a couple of judges: Vittorio (Nanni Moretti) and Dora (Margherita Buy). One evening, his twenty-year-old son Andrea (Alessandro Sperduti) runs over and kills a woman and then asks his parents to help him get a softer sentence. The three different events, contrary to what happens in the book, touch each other.
Nanni Moretti plays a judge.
A cold film compared to the book
It is the first time that Nanni Moretti does not start from an original subject but is inspired by a novel. The transfer of the setting from Tel Aviv to Rome penalized the film: if in Nevo’s novel the social and cultural reality of the Israeli city has weight, in Three floors the story of our society is missing. Reflections and sensations of the characters are missing and the film appears colder than the splendid book: the facts recounted in the text appear, but without a clear reason why they happen.
Nanni Moretti, Margherita Buy and Alessandro Sperduti.
TO Cannes 2021 the film was greeted by 11 minutes of applause which, however, did not turn into any prizes. «I suddenly became old», commented Nanni Moretti in an ironic post on Instagram.
At the press conference there was no lack of comment on the judgment of the critics: «Forty years ago I read everything, I even bought the newspapers at night: now I’m more detached, I tend not to read more than a couple of reviews. The more time passes, the more I like this job. With this film I then had the opportunity to investigate universal themes that are dear to me: the importance of choice, the sense of guilt, responsibility towards ourselves and towards others».
Nanni Moretti with part of the cast of “Three floors” at Cannes 2021: From left Karen Di Porto, Elena Lietti, Denise Tantucci, Margherita Buy, Alba Rohrwacher, Chiara Abalsamo and Gea Dall. (Contrast)
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In the cast the “usual” Margherita Buy with Riccardo Scamarcio
Riccardo Scamarcio, Alba Rohrwacher, Anna Bonaiuto, Paolo Graziosi, Alessandro Sperduti, Elena Lietti, Chiara Abalsamo star in the film together with Margherita Buy. Men and women have different shades in the film. Moretti explained: «The male characters are “embedded” in their obsessions, like Scamarcio, their rigidity, the man I play, or their nonchalance, that of Giannini. Each of them is convinced they are right and for this reason they stay still and nailed, they don’t move. The female characters, on the contrary, have another propensity towards others, and try to mend and dissolve conflicts». .
Alba Rohrwacher loved her character: «One evening, during filming, I sent Nanni a message to tell him that I loved Monica very much. As I “got to know” her, I let myself be conquered by her condition of forced solitude, I let myself be moved so much that I always felt at his side. We decided with Nanni to give a vein of disorder to “Monica” even through the red color of her hair.
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