CINEMA: Hey, Nanni

Let's take a look at the fall fashions in movie directors' egos. Quentin Tarantino shows up in his own film, Pulp Fiction, and has everybody talk like him -- which is fine, since he's a great talker. Wes Craven, director of A Nightmare on Elm Street, takes himself very seriously now, so he calls his new picture Wes Craven's New Nightmare, and it is the ultimate in self-reverential cinema.

Then there's Nanni Moretti, who displays a more genial egotism. Though the Italian actor-writer-director is in every scene of Caro Diario (Dear Diary) -- an episodic film that is the equivalent of an artist's sketchbook -- his is a skeptical, almost modest form of auteur hubris.

Join Nanni on his Vespa, motoring through Rome, savoring the barren landscape, stopping at the spot where Pasolini was murdered, singing along with an outdoor band and looking -- in his beard, dark glasses and black shirt -- like an anarchist who has joined the Ricky Ricardo Orchestra. Visit the Italian islands with Nanni and his bookish friend (Renato Carpentieri) as they see their friends utterly dominated by bratty kids. Get lost in the labyrinth of Italian medicine as Nanni consults dozens of doctors to discover the source of a skin rash, only to learn troubling truths about his body and their expertise.

This concluding vignette ends his vacation-like jaunt with a crash against the brick wall of mortality. But that still can't shake Moretti's take-it-as- it-comes philosophy. For this engaging artist, in life as on a scooter, the journey is the adventure.