No Laughing Matter

• Share

If the tension driving Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti's latest work sounds familiar, it should. A down-and-out B-movie producer unwittingly signs on to make a fiercely critical film about the rise of an Italian media mogul turned Prime Minister. Efforts to finish the film are thwarted by unseen political and economic forces. And the Italian politician is so despised by his cinematic nemeses that they assign him a nasty moniker: the Caiman (a ferocious creature related to the alligator), which gives Moretti's movie — and the film inside it — its name. The reptile, of course, is intended to represent none other than Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's former Premier, who last month lost his bid for re-election after five years in office. But Moretti's entry at the 59th Cannes Film Festival, which opens this week, isn't a documentary. Instead, it is a fictional rendering that displays the 52-year-old Roman director's power to push at the walls separating film and reality, moviemaker and spectator, without suffocating in cleverness or self-indulgence.

Moretti's knack for knowing the boundaries of melodrama earned him best directing honors at Cannes for his 1993 Caro Diario (Dear Diary) and the 2001 Palme d'Or for La Stanza del Figlio (The Son's Room). This year, he is again among the favorites to win the top prize for Il Caimano, a multilayered portrait of a disintegrating marriage, the movie business and that certain billionaire politician. Potential praise at Cannes aside, Moretti has spent much of the past five years denouncing the very man whose presence inspired his film. Il Caimano debuted in March amid Berlusconi's bitter campaign against Romano Prodi. Although Moretti says he had no Michael Moore-style mission, there's no denying the singular timing.

Il Caimano is not Moretti's first political film, but his anti-Berlusconi sentiments run so deep that for the first time he has left no ambiguity on — or off — the screen about where he stands. In February 2002, less than a year after the former Prime Minister's final victory, Moretti took the stage at a center-left rally in Rome and launched a broadside against the opposition leaders standing next to him, criticizing their inability to contend with Berlusconi. A political movement built up around the director that circumvented the major opposition parties. Rallies sprang up in the form of giant human chains, one encircling the Rome headquarters of rai state television to protest Berlusconi's conflicts of interest as owner of half the country's TV channels — no wonder it was nicknamed the Ring-Around-the-Rosy campaign.

A year later, Moretti quietly ceased his public political activities and began Il Caimano. His challenge was to sharpen a story that Italians were watching every day on TV. "A filmmaker should surprise and, if possible, depict a reality that we still can't see," he says. "In today's Italy, we're not talking about a reality that hasn't arrived yet, but one that's been here that we still can't manage to see." Il Caimano, though, isn't just about politics. The struggling producer, played by Silvio Orlando, is separating from his wife, just as he is trying to make his film. When the more intimate side of the plotline dominates, Il Caimano recalls Moretti's last feature, La Stanza del Figlio, a subtly powerful depiction of a family trying to cope with the accidental death of a son.

It was that film that may have marked the real watershed in Moretti's career. Until then, he had essentially played himself in nearly all his dozen-plus movies, even when the protagonist was a famous politician with amnesia (Palombella Rossa, or Red Wood Pigeon) or a local priest with anger-management issues (La Messa è Finita, or The Mass has Ended). Moretti's serial use of a humorous, self-referencing onscreen persona — and one plagued with late 20th century, middle-class angst — has drawn inevitable comparisons to Woody Allen. But whereas Allen tends to distance himself from his onscreen characters, the Italian director milked the connection. In his two features from the 1990s, Moretti played the part of a Roman filmmaker named Nanni Moretti trying to make a movie. But La Stanza del Figlio did not figure the usual Nanni-esque protagonist — and in Il Caimano he even gave up the lead role, to Orlando. "I wanted to abandon that [self-referencing] persona," Moretti says. "Before that, there was me, me and me, with some other satellites around me."

For the role of Berlusconi, Moretti spread the wealth: Italian star Michele Placido plays the part for a bit; a look-alike actor Elio De Capitani also takes on the role; and Berlusconi himself appears in real television footage. But Moretti reserves the last Berlusconi scene for his actor-of-choice: himself. In a chilling finale, the bearded director recites some of Berlusconi's bitterest words as he heads to a courthouse showdown. How did he prepare for the part? Moretti says that too often Berlusconi's opponents focused on his "comic and cabaret" moments. "He's never made me laugh," says Moretti. "I wanted to emphasize the danger. Italy has got used to considering normal things that are simply unacceptable for a democracy." So when the onscreen director says "Action!" and Moretti steps into the shiny shoes and mirror-windowed car of his adversary, it is pure Berlusconi — and Moretti. "I wanted to play the role without imitating or parodying," he says. The actor-director also appears earlier in the film, this time as himself. Waving away a request to participate in Il Caimano, Moretti says he's working on a comedy instead. But why in these times, the producer asks, would he make a comedy? "It's always the right time to make a comedy!" Moretti, the actor, declares. Moretti, the director, clearly did not agree.