«The sun of the future», Nanni Moretti questions himself in the sunset of the certainties of the past (score 8 and 1/2)- Corriere.it

It’s not a testament film and it’s not even a recap film (despite the final parade of faces). Rather it is an interrogative film, melancholy interrogative: with “Il sol dell’avvenire” it really seems that Moretti wanted to question himself and above all his audience, not to draw some kind of balance but rather to wonder and ask what sense it can have still making films «à la Moretti».

Evidently the not very brilliant outcome of the last one «Three floors» (the first time in which the director relied on a story by others, where even his presence was very limited) and the fact that many in the audience had complained about the absence of that arsenal of jokes and gags to introduce into use, must have prompted him to some reflection. In his manner, obviously, which does not exclude irony and amusement (indeed, there is a lot of laughter in the film) but which also involves a good deal of second thoughts and bitterness.

Just starting with the subject, the cross story of director Giovanni (Moretti, ça va sans dire) and the film he is making. We see him preparing the shoot, discussing with his wife Paola (Margherita Buy) who has been producing his films for forty years and with his daughter Emma (Valentina Romani) to whom he has entrusted the music, then with the actors and the crew and making site inspections nights on a scooter with the French co-producer (Mathieu Amalric). And then, from the set scenes we pass directly to those of the film, set in 1956, when the manager of a suburban section of the Roman PCI (Silvio Orlando), flanked by his equally militant wife (Barbora Bobulova), has invited the Hungarian circus Budavari, which will pitch its tents just when the Hungarians rebel against the regime, only to be crushed by Soviet tanks in a few days.

Continuously alternating the two temporal planes and the two stories, Moretti (who wrote the screenplay with Francesca Marciano, Federica Pontremoli and Valia Santella) manages to tell the private and the professional, the set and the film, the husband and the director by mixing, with a narrative freedom that refers to «Dear Diary », Moretism and reflection on cinema, irony (and in massive doses self-irony) and melancholy. Because it would be wrong to stop at the “usual” sample of foibles and idiosyncrasies: superstitious rituals, contempt for sabots and slippers, the reiteration of clapperboards, the desire to intervene in other people’s lives and in other people’s films, the passion for Italian songs primarily.

That’s all there as well as some obvious self-quotations, but after the laugh something else emerges, which Moretti’s face as an actor underlines unequivocally: it is as if he were obeying a sort of compulsion to repeat, “forced” to satisfy an audience that would only want that kind of fun. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the subject of the film within the film is the torment of communist militants in the face of the Soviet invasion and the orthodoxy of the PCI, almost as if Moretti felt like someone who had been forced to return to the ranks of orthodoxy and not to follow the passion that instead triumphs in the utopian sign that closes the film.

It also reiterates this from the point of view of the protagonist to whom the ballet and the final fashion show cannot hide her double failure, the human one as a husband and the professional one as a director: on both fronts she will have to deal with an unequivocal defeat. Certainly Moretti is not a person who gives up easily, in the dialogue he establishes with the spectator he demonstrates a stubbornness that does not want to accept defeat and somewhere a point in his favor marks it (for example with the reluctant engaged couple who look «La dolce vita») but the iron certainties of the past have long since faded. But without feeling sorry for yourself or indulging in useless nostalgia: the sun that illuminates the future, the film seems to tell us, will continue to rise but will no longer be able to hide the wounds they have and have made us.