A Brighter Tomorrow: Nanni Moretti recycles his greatest hits

• Reviewed at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

With 1993’s Caro Diario, Nanni Moretti was admitted into the elite club of auteurs who hold a virtually open invitation to the main competition at Cannes. Not to imply a direct causality (even if the thought is worth entertaining), but a trend is emerging among this eminent cohort of what might be described as greatest hits films: late career self-reflexive works that openly and extensively reference elements from across the director’s own oeuvre. Michael Haneke has Happy End (2017), David Cronenberg has Crimes of the Future (2021) and Moretti now has A Brighter Tomorrow.

Moretti’s walk down memory lane is transparently a reaction to the critical and commercial failure of his previous film, Three Floors (2021). Many of his long-time admirers draw a clear line from this career low point back to the Palme d’Or winner The Son’s Room (2001), which marked a significant change of direction in Moretti’s filmmaking. Having always played the lead in his films, he thereafter relegated himself to secondary roles. His neurotic and endearingly sententious alter egos – these appeared in a variety of guises, though most often as film directors – were replaced with characters who are no less moralising but much less funny, while the trenchant irony of his worldview increasingly gave way to sentimentalism.

In A Brighter Tomorrow, Moretti returns as the protagonist and revives his erstwhile persona, once again playing a director called Giovanni. He is preparing a new film, set in 1956, about a Hungarian travelling circus invited to Rome by a local office of the Italian Communist Party. The circus’ arrival coincides with the Soviet invasion of Budapest, precipitating an identity crisis among the Italian Communists who are torn between denouncing the aggression and abiding by their party’s strict allegiance to the USSR.

His wife and producer Paola (Margherita Buy) has decided to leave him and secretly starts seeing a therapist, hoping to muster the courage to end their 40-year marriage. Giovanni, oblivious to this impending turn of fate, terrorises his family and crew with his fastidious eccentricities, is in turn tortured by the pretentions of his actors, and gets lost in reveries about other films he’d rather make, such as an adaptation of John Cheever’s The Swimmer with himself in the lead (a pretty good joke, considering that an adaptation already exists and stars Burt Lancaster).

 So far, so familiar, and that’s very much the intention. From the beginning, Moretti self-consciously recycles characters and tropes that have defined his oeuvre. “A ritual must always be the same!” says Giovanni against the demurrals of his wife and daughter, insisting that they uphold their tradition of watching Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961) on the eve of a new shoot. The others eventually leave and Giovanni finishes the sacrosanct viewing by himself.

Again and again, his opposition to change is challenged but he remains steadfast. Meanwhile, the iconic quilt from Sweet Dreams (1981) makes an appearance; the entire cast sings a song whose title – “Sono solo parole” (i.e. “They are only words”) – harks back to the indelible slogan “Words are important!” from Red Wood Pigeon (1989); and Giovanni takes his French producer (Mathieu Amalric) on an e-scooter ride through Rome in a pitiful reprise of Caro Diario’s romantic Vespa tours.

The proliferating self-references mainly invoke films from the first half of Moretti’s career, which reads like a concession to those who for years have been saying he lost his way: since Three Rooms, his most radical departure, resulted in his biggest fiasco, he is throwing in the towel and giving the naysayers what they want.

A certain poignancy imbues this gesture, though it proves deceptive. In moments in A Brighter Tomorrow, Giovanni appears to realise his alienation, as in the central and funniest set piece. After barging in on the shoot of a younger and more hip director, he holds the crew hostage overnight with a snowballing tirade against the vulgarity of contemporary film violence until, at dawn, he is overcome with futility and walks away defeated, an old man out of touch with the world around him. (Unexpectedly, there are echoes here to Clint Eastwood’s late films.)

The humility is short-lived, however. After lamenting some more about the declining times, with stale digs taken at Netflix and the globalisation of film production, Moretti builds to a finale that vindicates him while calling his critics philistines who deserve this sorry state of affairs. It’s all said with a facetious smile, and A Brighter Tomorrow is on the whole a breezy affair, but Moretti’s complacency – thrown into even sharper relief by the glib parallel drawn between the invasion of Budapest and the current war in Ukraine – also ensures that it remains expendable.