Filmmaker Nanni Moretti returns to cinemas with Il sol dell’avvenire/A Brighter Tomorrow, which was released in Romania on the 2nd of February. As melancholy as ever, his fight against time and the lack thereof, always renewed, has lost nothing of its urgency.

What is a burlesque actor? Someone who experiments the world through the physical act of weighing it. There is nobody fitter than Nanni Moretti for the role of one who chastises a hipster director who – sacrilege! – was incapable of understanding that a bullet to the head results in a couple of dozen kilos of dead weight, even at the cinema. For Moretti, who has dedicated his entire career to a simple idea – how to maintain (contain) oneself within your own body in the most efficient way – this is the basis of any moral standing. To neglect the question of the body means to fall prey to vulgarity. The old adage of the filmmaker simultaneously goes against and beyond a so-called ecology of violence: because it sees something both transcendent and concrete in death – a destruction of the potentialities of the body, a forced interruption of the permanent negotiation between body and environment.

Said scene takes place on the set of a film; we’re right before the wrap, and the only thing left to shoot is a caricaturesque assassination. Moretti’s character – a cantankerous director named Giovanni, who bears all the parameters of the director himself – is there only because his wife is producing said film. Maybe due to jealousy, maybe due to his fear that his expiry date is coming up, he starts rambling on about how wrong everything that is happening in front of his eyes is, As a counterpoint, he decides to give the example of the death in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing (1988): that very admirable film put to the stage a heavy, grimy murder, that happens almost blindly and taints everything around it – the killer (of course), the spectator who is made to witness this dilated material, and even the victim itself, because it turns into a sort of obstacle in the path of fiction. Of course, for Moretti, this tormented, abject, and seemingly never ending death is an ideal in terms of matter. The obstruction of frivolity is a necessary act. A paradox, but not quite: in the case of this (p)artizan of frustrated communication, who never ceased to search for a form in which his body could obstruct any clear, totalitarian flow in his films, the cinema of special effects is a gimmick that erases responsibilities, that strips things of their adequate weight. Here, fiction is what cancels friction: an escape from reality.

A man who got to know the world exclusively through his own forces was needed to describe the definitive violence of the gesture of spreading death on screen, thanks to a clicking of a fake pistol. According to him, the problem is not as much the cliche of violence that gives birth to even more violence etc., as much as it is the fundamental lack of honesty that it is derived from: today, on the big screen, violence always comes too easily. The reason is simple: violence sells; one can always bet on it. By contrast, a burlesque actor is especially a body that, by exposing itself, is doing physical work. At every step, he is obligated to put his entire being at stake – to risk (maybe his gag will fail: it’s a wager) and swear (no single laugh is guaranteed). As such, the limits of his actions are the limits of his own body – hence Moretti’s directorial lesson, who knows that he is incapable of imposing onto someone else what he isn’t capable of doing himself. There is an unwritten contract between the being of the film, the being of the actor and the being of the spectator. Even so, in the director’s infantile jubilation in the film one films more than just childishness – rather, even worse, a total lack of awareness towards this contract. Along with a total submission in front of money.

One could cynically laugh at this vieux-jeu morale. One could find so many counter-examples where violence, however aestheticized, clinical or repetitive it may be, gives birth to more troubling consequences than its manifest portrayal. We could finally fully reject this tirade of an old man that is hell-bent on giving a lesson to the young’uns. At the same time, it wouldn’t hurt if we could understand where Moretti is coming from. Because, before being a political conscience, he is a mouth that cannot help but speak truth to power – and before being this mouth, he is a body that reacts whenever it feels that it is touched. “It’s not just a matter of coherence, it’s also one of principle,” as his cinematic alter ego beautifully sums it up. Hence the greatness of this protagonist who – against the childish impulses of the industry, against Netflix, against defeatism – chooses not to sell (himself). Ever since the days of Chaplin, burlesque was also the false naivete that fought against evil, searching for gaps that it could use to speak its own truth.

A Brighter Future is a story that is obsessed about its own past. Within the film’s particular logic, everything comes from somewhere else. A political struggle – for example, that of 1956 Hungary, which the film-within-the-film obliquely adapts to the stage – that comes from the revolutionary part of Europe. An e-scooter that “comes” from the Vespa that Moretti majestically rode in Caro Diario (1993). A flowery duvet that comes from Sogni d’oro (1981) – and quite literally so, because the young Moretti was already covering himself up with it back then. And the wrinkly and unshaven Moretti, whose eyes are as lively as ever, comes from the sapling that discovered politics and sports at the end of the seventies: quicker than the rest of his generation – he was barely twenty when he released his first feature film –, but running against the clock from the very beginning; that is, at a time when the iconic battles for emancipation, the ones that mattered, were already history. At one point, while doing his rounds in a swimming pool, the protagonist sighs: “I should’ve directed The Swimmer forty years ago when I was slimmer and in good shape”. Except he did: under the title of Palombella rossa (1989), a superb film in which Moretti, a member of the Italian Communist Party and a professional polo player, was confronting the painful, gradual restriction of the world’s ideals. Narrowly anticipating the dismantling of the communist block, that film ushered in a period of grieving within the oeuvre of this humorist, who transformed into the stubborn keeper of a critical conscience in an increasingly absent society.

This thing, which Moretti repeats insistently as a reminder of sorts, is both annoying and touching. An author to the very end, the Italian mobilizes the same elements that he has developed into a sort of personal cosmogony over the past few decades. For this filmmaker who is increasingly obsessed with the idea of belonging – wasn’t he the very same person who, in that sublime sequence in Caro Diario, went on a pilgrimage of sorts to the beach where Pasolini was assassinated? –, what remains is the satisfaction of being the last one standing. An oft-forgotten fact is that, beyond the jokes born of his annoyingly precise intelligence, Moretti embodies this moral idea of the body as an act of resistance. For him, coming to the fore meant more than testing one’s physical prowess: his body worked smoothly (Moretti was young, went jogging, and was an insatiable football player); the issues concerned his political thinking. There was where the delay, the difference towards the others lay – the source of gags, the source of tragedy. Because the burlesque actor always set out to repair all the world’s ills, all by himself. A rather vast project – increasingly vast – that the Italian inherited amid an increasingly suffocating solitude.

There is a very beautiful scene within the film: in it, we see Moretti, at the end of a day of shooting, in the middle of a set that is slowly winding down, playfully kicking a football. However, after just a few movements, he has to sit down on a bench and catch his breath. This barely sketched sequence acts, however, like a flash: all of a sudden, we understand how the body starts to fail. And this is when we are haunted by the appearance, as if in a super-imposition, of the vigorous, slightly progressive priest performed by Moretti in La Messa è finita (1985), who played ball with the kids from around his parish, not thinking too much about holy things. Now, Moretti is growing old – and he will never cease to impress us with the fable of his body which, after fighting the entire system for our sake, is finally starting to need us, the younger ones, to be able to go forward. The only trouble is that the latter ones might not be there anymore: see the rather bitter scene in which the character’s daughter is unable to sit down for the ritualistic screening of Lola (1961), which is her father’s lucky talisman of sorts because she has a date with her boyfriend. From his family to the Party, the hardest thing for Moretti the dreamer to swallow is the lack of solidarity.

The film’s protagonist repeatedly complains that he cannot “only make a film once every five years”. This is an obvious swing towards this heavy system that lays a trap for filmmakers, turning them into the absurd performers of their cause. But there is something deeper than this at stake: it’s as if Moretti feels that he should hasten the pace, not just to occupy the field, but also to delay his own retirement, by executing the gestures of his trade repeatedly. And this is what the film’s beauty consists of: Moretti’s inability to decide between the posture of the old zany grandpa, offended by a new generation that he cannot understand, and the perseverance of one who cannot give (us) up. It’s part of the burlesque pedigree of being simultaneously against the world – because this is the only position, eschewing the center, even marginal, from which one can reveal its shortcomings and curiosities – and perpetually aware of it, attached to it, incapable of ever fully detaching.

When he described Francis Ford Coppola’s output in the eighties, critic Serge Daney spoke equally about the author/comic actor, the one who “is a testament to the chasm into which one tumbles when you are oscillating between the things that you no longer know how to do (the way you used to) and those that you don’t know to do (the way you were going to)”. One should additionally notice that being caught between means, at the same time, to never be fully accountable to someone. Which is why Moretti is allowing himself now – dozens of years after his “swimmer” – to open up the horizon in extremis: from the pool, he goes onto the street, in the middle of a crowd; the old obstacle-body transforms into a dancing body in search of levitation, lightness. More desperate, but also more idealistic than before, he can turn the film-within-the-film into a sort of political utopia in which everybody is shaking hands. It’s not a tranquilizing conscience, but rather, his one last shot at honest hope. This filmmaker who came onto the stage in the aftermath of May ‘68, who was a contemporary to the global loss of illusions, knows all too well that, in cinema (an art of après-coups and of taking stock), arriving on time can sometimes also mean arriving a bit too late.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.