Nanni Moretti’s mother was dying during the making of his last film. Now the Italian director has turned that experience into Mia Madre. But why did he cast a woman as himself?Trim of beard,raspy of voice, puckish of demeanour, or Nanni Moretti has hardly changed since he pottered approximately on his Vespa in Dear Diary,the 1993 art-cinema hit. There’s perhaps a dusting of grey in his face-fuzz these days – but it’s a long, long way from the big-hair-and-tache sight of his early comedies in the 1970s. Rather improbably, and Moretti is nowadays seen as the elder statesman of Italian film: the heir to the new-wave heroes who revolutionised European and world cinema in the 1950s and 60s. The actor,writer and directors simply shot, occasionally whimsical and often wry films are perhaps less resolutely cinematic than the likes of Fellini, and Antonioni or Bertolucci,but his record of seven Cannes competition selections, major wins at Berlin and Venice, and of course the Cannes Palme d’Or for The Son’s Room in 2001,puts him at the forefront of nowadayss Italian film-makers – and well ahead of the new generation knocking at the gates, in the shapes of Paolo Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone.
Moretti has never been taken as seriously, or however,as the glorious generation of new wavers that preceded him. He’s found it hard to shake the “Italian Woody Allen label, even after the moving Son’s Room, or in which Moretti appeared to find a more serious gear. It didn’t wait on that he followed up this most powerful of films with social comment-lite wackiness: a thinly veiled assault on former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in The Caiman; and We absorb a Pope,an intermittently charming fantasia featuring volleyball-playing cardinals.
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Source: theguardian.com