Having previously won the Palme d’Or in 2001 for “The Son’s Room” and premiered the majority of his films in competition, Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti has been a mainstay at the Cannes Film Festival for several decades. His latest film, “A Brighter Tomorrow,” marks a welcome return to the French Riviera following the poorly-received “Three Floors.” Getting special permission from Cannes to release his films locally prior to hitting the Croisette, Moretti’s 14th feature was released in Italian theaters on April 20, where it has greatly resonated with audiences and earned around $4 million.
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Written by Moretti, Francesca Marciano, Federica Pontremoli, and Valia Santella, “A Brighter Tomorrow” stars Moretti as Giovanni (his real name), an aging, obsessive director who is too attached to his passion project while dealing with a pile of issues including budget cuts, a dodgy French producer named Pierre (played by Mathieu Amalric), and actors who want to improvise that force him to reevaluate his approach to the film. At Giovanni’s side is his wife and producing partner of 40 years, Paola (Margherita Buy, who frequently stars in his work), who is exhausted by his stubbornness and has been secretly seeing a psychoanalyst and planning a divorce while producing her first standalone film.
Set against the backdrop of Rome circa 1956, the year of the Hungarian Revolution, the film-within-a-film he is making is a political period drama centering on the fall of the Italian Communist Party. It revolves around a circus from Budapest that arrives in the Italian capital after being invited by a party branch run by Ennio (Silvio Orlando), an editor at the Communist publication l’Unità, and his vice secretary, Vera (Barbora Bobuľová). While Giovanni’s film initially ends in despair with a suicide (which Orlando’s character has “always dreamt of”), he grows indecisive and ultimately rewrites the story (and history) to end on a joyous note capturing unity.
In an attempt to salvage the project after the money runs out, he and Paola set up an amusing meeting with Netflix. In the movie’s most hilarious moment, the streamer’s executives robotically mention being available to stream in 190 countries every few seconds and that Giovanni’s screenplay is a “slow burner that doesn’t detonate” and is missing a “what the fuck moment.”
In “A Brighter Tomorrow,” Moretti does what he does best: play a self-obsessed fictionalized version of himself, a persona we’ve seen in his earlier films like “Dear Diary.” Through this self-referential (and slightly self-critical, though not as much as it could be) comedy, the director (both Moretti and Giovanni) stays true to himself by taking a stand against the changes constantly being made within the entertainment world. He continues to make clear what he does and doesn’t like to see in cinema, such as gratuitous violence that is only played for entertainment. When visiting the set of a young up-and-coming director’s Tarantino-esque crime thriller, which Paola is producing, Giovanni intervenes to lecture everyone about why a scene involving a graphic execution isn’t good.
There is a little bit of everything in “A Brighter Tomorrow” as it maneuvers through different narratives, jumping from the film production to Giovanni’s film to his domestic life. There are even moments when characters randomly break into song and dance, transforming it into a quasi-musical that doesn’t quite flow well. The veteran filmmaker, frustrated with the state of modern cinema, provides valid criticism of the capitalist industry that has grown to prioritize streaming algorithms, but through an overly nostalgic lens driven by his strong morals that, while expressing hopefulness, gives the movie a dense feeling that limits its overall impact. [C+]
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