If the billboard doesn’t lie, The Sun of the Future, Nani Moretti’s latest film, should be released today. Whatever the movie is, it will be one of the good moments of the week. Reuniting with a filmmaker you like is a ritual that you learn to savor without falling into hopeless idolatry and fleeing from excess expectations. I admit it: I belong to the repellent category of those who have seen I don’t know how many times Caro Diario and Aprile and who, despite that, still confuse them. The only consolation we have left is that we are not as repellent as those who, instead of knowing that they have seen a movie I don’t know how many times, count them to boast of a competitive accuracy that says more about their obsessive psychology than about their compromise.
The title of The Sun of the Future (Il sol dell’avvenire in the original version) is an ironic reference to the communist slogans – grandiose and failed – of the 20th century. The plot: a filmmaker in a marital, creative and economic crisis makes a film about a filmmaker who, in 1956, directs a film. Metacinema without complexes and a self-referential sarcasm that helps digest the ideological and biographical contradictions of the protagonist and, by extension, of the film industry. The conversations of the character played by Moretti with the voracious representatives of a platform – which are expressed through a diabolical chain of Anglicisms – have the tragicomic category of a manifesto.
Moretti’s work is a mutant monument that grows and improves with each new contribution. Reflective, disenchanted, ironic, loyal to the sentimental intangibles of lost causes and, at the same time, belligerent against the fabrication of dogmas and sectarian clichés. And, with respect to cinema (atmospheres, dialogues, balance between intention and emotion, talent for capturing the paradoxes of love and lack of love), a true master. And still today, when he promotes a film, he has to answer questions about what he thinks about film consumption through platforms. In a recent interview (in Le Point), he says: “When I write a film, I think about people who don’t know each other. Who enter a dark room and see an image much bigger than themselves. “If I thought about an audience that watches the film through a computer screen or a mobile phone screen, I would not feel like writing it or shooting it.” From today on, then, we have the possibility of meeting each other without knowing each other: those of us who do not know how many times we have seen his films, those who tell them with psychopathic rigor and those who – what a bit of envy – will perhaps discover it (the moment in which it sounds Franco Batiatto’s “Voglio vedertidancere”) and will want to look back, with the joy of someone riding a scooter, over a sensational filmography.
