Get ready for a hilarious ride with Nanni Moretti’s latest comedy, which features not one, but two films-within-a-film (plus a surreal dream sequence). After the disappointment of 2021’s melodramatic Three Floors, A Brighter Tomorrow is a breath of fresh air at a crisp 96 minutes. Moretti’s neuroses are on full display as he pontificates on everything from movie violence to streaming platforms, and even the fashion faux pas of wearing slippers onscreen (unless you’re Aretha Franklin in The Blues Brothers).
As usual in Moretti’s self-reflexive pieces, the main film being made within the film is something that no director would ever make and no modern audience would ever pay to see. Set in 1956, it follows Hungary’s Budavari Circus as they arrive in Rome’s Quarticciolo area, escaping the Soviet invasion of Budapest. The Russians’ treatment of Hungary provokes a schism in the Italian Communist Party, with some wanting a divorce from the motherland and others too cowed by the legacy of Stalin to voice their criticisms.
The film-within-a-film’s director, Giovanni (played by Moretti himself), is a bit of a tyrant, refusing to depict Stalin in the movie as an ironic act of Stalinism. Instead, he wants to make a film about people power, in which the local residents band together to help the circus performers. Meanwhile, Giovanni’s wife Paola (played by the always excellent Margherita Buy) has had enough of his bad temper and takes on a side project – the other film-within-the-film, a wholly populist gangster movie that may be a snipe at the rise of commercial Italian cinema.
The clash between this new frontier and the increasingly fuddy-duddy cinema de papa is the fuel that drives A Brighter Tomorrow to the finish line. Notably, there’s a bravura sequence in which Giovanni stops production on the gangster movie to interrogate the ethics of movie violence, invoking Woody Allen in Annie Hall by calling on real-life figures for advice, such as architect Renzo Piano, novelist Chiara Valerio, and even the great Martin Scorsese (sadly, the call goes to answerphone).
But there’s also the specter of Netflix to contend with, and Giovanni takes a meeting with the streamer on the advice of his deadbeat French producer Pierre (played by the increasingly gonzo Mathieu Amalric). He leaves the meeting none the wiser, having learned only that the streamer sells its wares in 190 countries, demands that something happen in the first two minutes, refuses to accept that Italy has a star system, and pulls the plug on the meeting when it becomes clear there is no “WTF moment” in his project.
While the initial momentum is strong, Moretti’s film soon becomes directionless, drifting into surrealism with a dream sequence involving the younger Giovanni and Paola that doesn’t quite fit in anywhere. Finally, the director seems to give up altogether, finishing with a silly dance routine that morphs into an endless circus parade featuring not just the cast of A Brighter Tomorrow in their civvies, but also a few familiar faces from Moretti’s previous films. Is this the end of Moretti’s trademark film-within-a-film shtick? Only time will tell.
Don’t miss A Brighter Tomorrow, premiering at Cannes in competition. Starring Nanni Moretti, Margherita Buy, and Mathieu Amalric, and with a running time of 1 hour and 36 minutes, this film is sure to leave you laughing and pondering the state of cinema today. Sales agent: Kinology.
