‘A Brighter Tomorrow’ Review: Nanni Moretti’s Fitfully Funny Portrait Of a Fuddy-Duddy Film-Maker – Cannes Film Festival
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Nanni Moretti returns to the film-within-a-film format with a fitfully funny new comedy that, this time, offers two films-within-a-film (plus a surreal dream sequence). It is, frankly, a relief after 2021’s terrible, soapy melodrama Three Floors, and, at a crisp 96 minutes, so much easier to swallow. In some ways a companion piece to 2015’s Mia Madre, it finds the director putting all his neuroses back on show, pontificating on everything from movie violence to streaming platforms and why wearing slippers onscreen is a fashion no-no that can only be pulled off by Aretha Franklin in The Blues Brothers.
As is usual in Moretti’s self-reflexive pieces, the main film being made within the film is the kind of film that no director would ever make and that no modern audience would ever pay to see. Set in 1956, it sees Hungary’s Budavari Circus arriving in Rome’s Quarticciolo area, escaping the Soviet invasion of Budapest. The Russians’ treatment of Hungary provokes a schism in the Italian Communist Party: some want a divorce from the motherland, others are too cowed by the legacy of Stalin to voice their criticisms.
More from Deadline
The film-within-a-film’s director, Giovanni (Moretti), is something of a tyrant himself, which he establishes by refusing to depict Stalin in the movie, an ironic act of Stalinism in itself. Instead, Giovanni wants to make a film about people power, in which the local residents band together and help the circus performers (one might intuit a not-terribly-subtle allegory for the current goings-on in Ukraine).
Moretti’s gruff and abrasive simulation of acting isn’t to all tastes, but here it suits the material, with Giovanni being a bad-tempered, cynical old goat whose wife Paola (the always excellent Margherita Buy) has had enough. “I want to leave but I can’t,” she tells the shrink she’s been seeing on the sly. “It’s never the right time.” Perhaps to force Giovanni’s hand, Paolo takes on a side project, the other film-within-the-film. This one is a wholly populist gangster movie, perhaps a snipe at the rise of a more commercial Italian cinema with the likes of Salvo and, more pointedly, Sicilian Ghost Story.
The clash between this new frontier and the increasingly fuddy-duddy cinema de papa is the fuel that gets A Brighter Tomorrow to the finish line. Notably, this involves a bravura sequence in which Giovanni stops production on the gangster movie while he interrogates the ethics of movie violence, invoking Woody Allen in Annie Hall by calling on real-life figures for advice, such as architect Renzo Piano, novelist Chiara Valerio and even the great Martin Scorsese (sadly, the call goes to answerphone).
There’s also the specter of Netflix to contend with, and, on the advice of his deadbeat French producer Pierre (an increasingly gonzo Mathieu Amalric), Giovanni takes a meeting with the streamer. He leaves it none the wiser, having learned only that the streamer sells its wares in 190 countries, demands that something happen in the first two minutes, refuses to accept that Italy has a star system and pulls the plug on the meeting when it becomes clear there is no “WTF moment” in his project.
Sadly, the initial momentum doesn’t really hold, and Moretti’s film soon becomes directionless, drifting into surrealism with a dream sequence involving the younger Giovanni and Paola that doesn’t really seem to fit in anywhere. Finally, he seems to give up altogether, finishing with a silly dance routine that morphs into an endless circus parade that features not just the cast of A Brighter Tomorrow in their civvies but a few familiar faces from Moretti’s previous films. There’s an air of finality about it — is the director finally saying goodbye to his trademark film-within-a-film-shtick? – but if any director were to hang up their boots in such a subtle manner, it wouldn’t be Nanni Moretti.
Title: A Brighter Tomorrow
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director: Nanni Moretti
Screenwriters: Nanni Moretti, Francesca Marciano, Federica Pontremoli, Valia Santella
Cast: Nanni Moretti, Margherita Buy, Mathieu Amalric
Running time: 1hr 36min
Sales agent: Kinology
Best of Deadline
Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
