Nanni Moretti knows a few things about depression. It may not be the most hit key when looking at his work, but depression, psychological depression, inhabits almost all of his films. Ecce Bombo Habemus Papam , through Palombella Rossa or The Son’s Room , you can describe all these film as stories of men (or women) depressed. Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, more serious or more jocular way, lurk almost always, one of the first films Moretti (the Sogni d’Oro 1981) Freud himself appeared as “character.”
Come this introduction to say that My Mother is perhaps the Moretti film more focused on depression. Strictly speaking, through the evolution of its main characters (including Margharita Buy, to take what, instead, is rare in Moretti: a female protagonist); but also figuratively: socially, politically, and even artistically (the protagonist is a director in the middle of shooting a film about a strike in a factory), My Mother is a film about a great depression, Total depression.
It is not wrong, but it is short, see My Mother as a mirror of The Son’s Room . This was a film about parental grief over the sudden and unexpected loss. This is a film about losing announced on mourning their children – or more correctly, on their anticipation, as the lady (Giulia Lazzarini, one lean delicacy prodigy) is alive during the entire film. The mother’s character leaves undiminished to this, the Moretti look at it is always full, but the center of the film and their concern is not so much old age (at least in the same way as in Habemus Papam ), it’s that time of half an age when old age came to be in sight. In the complex emotional web of My Mother , and without prejudice to what is played in the relationship between mother and children (and granddaughter), the decisive role of the lady is to represent this final chapter, do the other characters confrontarem- with it, and so trigger the crisis, or the Great Depression. It’s the film that Buy is making it advances evil, the director full of doubts about his portrayal of a labor dispute (question “side” but that does not cease to be present and is obviously a concern morettiana : how to address today justly without the “rhetoric” that “tired” and says the character, the labor policy issues); is she who finds himself stalled in a kind of trench suddenly visible to pull her away from everyone else – mother, brother (Moretti himself), the daughter of ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends. This loneliness, fallen like a snowfall that not was waiting, is the real engine of the film, which can from it, draw the contours little defined between tangible reality and reality “inside”: the dreams, the description of dreams, always in the most proper and effective way to shoot them, ie no distortion or dream signs, ever so realistic as any everyday scene, with the awakening and revelation of what after all was a dream to never be further than one simple cut and plan for change. Sometimes bring mysteries, like that beautiful scene (the sound of Famous blue raincoat Leonard Cohen) in which the protagonist finds himself years ago, a huge queue for a film which is projected – perceive it by reference in the poster, but never made explicit – Wings of Desire Wim Wenders. Apart from “another time” – the time when the adults went to the movies – which brings this reference (even implied a old lady of dialogue) to Moretti’s film? It is not right, and it’s nothing certain, but it is something that is hovering, and a “climate”, and, moreover, Cohen’s words in that song, perhaps the most disconsolate opening lines of any song ( “are four in the morning in late December”), and it contributes to this is also the “time” of Moretti’s film.
But the riskiest may be the inclusion of the character of John Turturro, in the shoes of an American actor who is playing a role in the film Buy. Is always out of tune, unable to find the right profile in the “film within a film” but inherently also always “dyssynchrony” with Moretti film, or like a fish out of water – and this gives to his character a lonely quality, which is strange first and then penetrates, as if he were a reflection of Margharita Buy buffoon character and would eventually be in recognition of this reflection, a possibility of understanding. Also contributing to Moretti say a few things about cinema, a film obsessed with an idea of fairness (and Turturro is so much more “fair” and more “fake” or “designing” a miraculous paradox achieved by Moretti), but may also evokes those times when it was common to see American actors to exchange the aquarium Hollywood by “savages” Italian lands (Broderick Crawford in Bidone of Felllini, Steve Cochran in Scream Antonioni Orson Welles in Ricotta of Pasolini, and others).
In his ways “Benigni-ESCOs,” Turturro is an expression of concern that character Buy stifles and internalizes. And if, in the end, is reserved for the most peaceful scene of the entire film (the old lady to help her granddaughter in Latin works – and Latin always like a deep echo), this concern is not resolved: My mother closed between the peace of death and restlessness of life without a smile or a way out.
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