{"id":519040,"date":"2023-07-05T14:01:43","date_gmt":"2023-07-05T12:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=519040"},"modified":"2025-12-04T22:22:44","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T21:22:44","slug":"towards-a-bright-future-a-sun-that-wont-set","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/cinema\/films\/towards-a-bright-future-a-sun-that-wont-set\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00abTowards a bright future: a sun that won't set"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fifteenth feature film by Nanni Moretti<\/strong>, <\/strong>Towards a bright future <\/strong><\/em>serves as a testamentary film. Beneath its false air of comedy, the film turns into a laborious lesson in cinema. But can you blame Moretti for doing Moretti?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Thirty years earlier Diary<\/em>, Nanni Moretti's most personal work. Director, actor and man became one. On the film's cover, we see him from behind on his Vespa. Thirty years later, Moretti is from the front on an electric scooter. He swaps Italy's iconic national symbol for a standardized, globalized means of locomotion. If Diary<\/em>, While the title of the first film left no doubt as to its intimate, not to say navel-gazing, the second is a trap for the viewer, who expects a comedy and finds himself taken hostage by the verbose dissertations of a director at the end of his career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Towards a bright future <\/em>features Moretti's double: Giovanni. The latter is about to make a film about a historical period in Communist Italy, a period of which he is a great nostalgic. A process already used in The Caiman<\/em> (2006), the filmmaker returns to the mise en abyme: a film within a film. What follows is a back-and-forth between the story of the film and Giovanni's existential concerns. His wife wants to leave him, his daughter is neglecting him, his lead actress has a mind of her own, and his producer is over-indebted and desperate to land him a Netflix appointment that he loathes. In addition to these boring, hackneyed subjects, the filmmaker inflicts on us, in a heavy display of self-mockery, the comments of a man consumed by nostalgia. All of this is interspersed with musical pauses where the actors, for the time being, reunite in a choir.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ego-trip<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

For neophytes unfamiliar with Morettian cinema, Towards a bright future <\/em>is an ordeal. For the insider, the ordeal was predictable. The filmmaker has always nourished his films with his personal life. Director, actor and man regularly come together as a single unit, sometimes playing with his own children, or in his real apartment. His radical subjectivity and \u00abfirst-person\u00bb cinema make Moretti a unique filmmaker. Since the 2000s, the filmmaker has established a greater distance between himself and his fictional subjects. Dramas such as The son's room <\/em>(2001) or, more recently, Tre piani <\/em>(2021). He even tried his hand at the documentary genre in 2018 with Santiago, Italia<\/em>. Too little known, the subject of this work was Italy's role in welcoming Chilean political refugees after the coup d'\u00e9tat against Allende.<\/p>\n\n\n\n