Moretti, Nanni

(1953– )

   Atalented, though highly political and somewhat narcissistic, film director, Nanni Moretti was born in Brunico (Alto Adige) but has lived all his life in Rome, which is also the location of many of his films. Moretti is also an accomplished actor and documentary film maker and was a semiprofessional water polo player, which helped him with the setting of his film Palombella Rosso (1989).

   Moretti’s career began with two critically acclaimed art-house movies, Ecce Bombo(1978) and Bianca(1984), but commercial as well as critical success arrived in the 1990s with a series of well-regarded films. In Il Portaborsa (directed by Daniele Lucchetti, 1991), Moretti played the part of an unscrupulous politician who employs an idealistic Neapolitan intellectual (Silvio Orlando) as a speechwriter. Orlando and Moretti brilliantly complement each other in what is one of the most illuminating political movies made in Italy in recent years. As a director, Moretti made and starred in CaroDiario(Dear Diary, 1993) and Aprile (April, 1998). These films are superbly scripted and developed, but as with Woody Allen, one cannot help but conclude that the film’s main subject is the director’s own personality. By contrast, La Stanza del Figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, is a subtle depiction of how a highly rational, progressive, upper-class family deals with the trauma caused by the accidental death of their son. In the most famous scene in Aprile, Moretti’s character is watching Massimo D’Alema debating with Silvio Berlusconi on television and urges him to “say something left-wing; say something not even left-wing, just civilized.” Since Berlusconi’s victory in the 2001 elections Moretti has become a political activist of some importance and has been an outspoken critic of the official parties of the centerleft. In 2002, together with a number of other public intellectuals, he launched the girotondo movement (so-called because its first public protest was to form a ring of people holding hands around the Parliament) to press for a more ethical public life and for a less accommodating line toward Berlusconi on the part of the political Left. Moretti’s most recent film, Il Caimano (The Caiman, 2006) is a film about a filmmaker making a film about Berlusconi.

   See also Cinema.