Politically Activated

ROME —  Italy is one of the few countries in which the word “cineaste”--or rather “cineasta”--can still be used without opening oneself to ridicule. It’s also the kind of place where the political pronouncements of a film director are taken seriously. Especially when that director is Nanni Moretti.

The retrospective of Moretti’s films that opens at the American Cinematheque tonight under the banner “I Am Self-Sufficient: The Films of Nanni Moretti” offers Los Angeles a rare chance to see the work of a director who speaks for a whole generation of left-leaning, thirty- and fortysomething Italians. Only “Caro diario” (Dear Diary) has been released in the U.S., though “Palombella rossa” (Red Wood Pigeon, 1989) is available on home video.

One might assume, then, that this show is strictly for, well, cineastes. The kind of people who enjoy a movie like “Palombella rossa,” which--to quote from the American Cinematheque program--”uses a water polo match as an allegory of the stagnation of the Italian Communist Party.” But Moretti’s peculiar blend of dry irony and heart-on-sleeve commitment--channeled though the hero of each of his films, who is always played by the director himself--deserves a wider audience. And he may be about to get it.

On the evening of May 20, in the Palais du Cinema at Cannes, actress Liv Ullmann announced what most of those present already guessed--that Moretti had won the coveted Palme d’Or prize for his latest movie, “La stanza del figlio” (The Son’s Room, the literal translation adopted by the firm handling foreign sales. Cinematheque material uses the more prosaic Our Son’s Room). Moretti’s darkest film to date, this drama about the effect of bereavement on a happy, cultured, cohesive Italian family is, ironically, one of the least “Morettian” of the director’s movies.

It had been 23 years since the Palme d’Or--awarded for the best film in competition--went to an Italian director. But the dreams of empire fostered by greats like Fellini, Pasolini and Visconti have a tenacious hold on the Italian psyche. Which explains why Moretti’s victory led the evening TV news bulletins, pushing the latest Middle East violence into second place.

This being Italy, it was equally predictable that the story would be given a political spin. An editorial on the front page of leading daily newspaper La Repubblica the next day brought the subtext right out into the open: “We might say,” wrote Natalia Aspesi, media queen of Italy’s champagne left, “that with Nanni, the Left that lost the elections--the Left that he has always criticized, filmed, encouraged and voted for--has won something back.” Voting was in the Italian parliamentary elections of May 13, when right-wing party leader Silvio Berlusconi--who is to Nanni Moretti pretty much what George Bush is to Noam Chomsky--won a clear majority.

The typical Morettiano--who, like Aspesi, refers to the director simply as “Nanni”--is an articulate, witty, committed urban left-winger, his political soul forged in the protest years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. His disillusionment with today’s parliamentary left--a recurrent bugbear of Moretti’s on- and off-screen personas--does not prevent him from turning up to march with them, vote for them--or argue against them.

Well-versed in the finer points of Marxist dialectic (including the School of Groucho), and the language of film criticism as espoused by the Cahiers du Cinema, he may reveal himself to be oddly immature, and inarticulate, in his emotional and sexual relations. If he is a true disciple, he will ride a white Vespa around Rome, sport a full but neat beard and be addicted to the Austrian-style chocolate cake known as Sacher torte.

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I tracked Moretti down in Rome the day before he left for Los Angeles; an earlier appointment had to be canceled because he was out celebrating the “consolation” victory of center-left candidate Walter Veltroni in Rome’s mayoral elections. I asked him if he thought “The Son’s Room” might be his first film to make it big outside his homeland and France.

“When I’m making a film,” he replied, “I don’t even think about the local audience, let alone the international audience. I just focus on the need I have to shoot that particular story.” But Moretti admits to being pleased by the strong overseas sales of “The Son’s Room,” which he puts down to the fact that, unlike his overtly political movies, this family tragedy is “one of my most universal films.” Warner Bros. has picked up the movie for distribution in South America and Japan, and a U.S. deal is, Moretti says, “not far away.”

Moretti has been described as “the Woody Allen of Italian cinema,” but he says the comparison is pretty superficial. First off, Allen does psychoanalysis rather than politics. Secondly, “I’m a lot less productive than he is.” (Moretti makes a film every three or four years, while Allen is a hardy annual.) And finally, “I’ve never made a film that doesn’t have me in it.” But he can see why American and British critics so often press the Allen button in their attempts to explain his films to the uninitiated: “It’s true that we both treat our tics and neuroses with a sort of self-irony.”

The director is equally uncomfortable with the idea that he is the spokesman for a whole generation of disaffected former activists. “I’ve never had that ambition,” he says. “And my first two feature films [“Io sono un autarchico,” 1976, and “Ecce Bombo,” 1978] were actually sendups of that whole scene. It was the first time that the youth culture of the left in Italy had been treated with anything but gloomy, schematic seriousness.”

In fact, Moretti says that the persona he plays in his movies (once fixed as Michele Apicella, the character’s name now changes from film to film) is a flawed generational model. “When my character shouted out those lines that have since become slogans, I saw as much weakness as strength in his certainties. But when you become the object of a kind of fan culture, those subtleties are lost.”

Perhaps, then, the change of direction of “The Son’s Room”--a tragedy that owes more to Sophocles than Marx--was a way of shaking off the hard-core Morettiani and reaching out to a wider audience? “Perhaps. But what I’d really like is for my regular audience to change alongside me.”

Moretti will be in L.A. until Monday and plans to be present at a number of the screenings--including the first U.S. viewing of “The Son’s Room,” which opens the retrospective tonight. Time is tight, he says, because he is currently sifting through hundreds of short films to select the entrants for the Sacher Film Festival, which takes place every July in the director’s own Roman cinema, the Nuovo Sacher.

I conclude by bringing up the stunning party switch of U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords, and asking Moretti whether he might feel more at home in an America that has swung ever so slightly back to the left. “At home, no. It’s such an unfamiliar world to me. I just hope this brief visit will give me the chance to know it better.”

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Retrospective

* American Cinematheque screens “Films of Nanni Moretti.” Page 32