Il Sol dell’Avvenire (A Brighter Tomorrow), Nanni Moretti’s comic demonstration
From the young student protesters of1978’s Ecce Bombo, his first film in the Official Selection where he was a director, to the neurotic patients of La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room),Palme d’or winner in 2001, to the bitterness of the residents of the three-storey apartment building in Tre Piani (Three Floors), (2021), Nanni Moretti has taken care to examine the hesitations of his contemporaries. In Il Sol dell’Avvenire (A Brighter Tomorrow, In Competition), he plays Giovanni, a famous artist who has a wake-up call.
For his tenth film In Competition, Nanni Moretti does not spare himself by playing Giovanni, a prolific director on the verge of a burnout, who is shooting his next film, writing the following and thinking of the third. Everything, both personal and professional, seems to be conspiring against him and, if he wants a brighter tomorrow, he’ll have to start rethinking his way of doing things. Avec Il Sol dell’Avvenire (A Brighter Tomorrow), the Italian maestro of autobiographical fiction goes back to comedy, reminiscint of the times of the emblematic Caro Diario (Dear Diary), winner of the Best Director Award in 1994, but on the poster this time a scooter has replaced the Vespa.
In the film, Giovanni is something of the sum of all the male characters, such as the one played by Mathieu Amalric and the one played by Silvio Orlando, the fictional secretary of the Communist Party struck by an existential crisis. Margherita Buy (Paola), his wife and producer in the film seeks to find her independence and the courage to break this link.
Il Sol dell’Avvenire (A Brighter Tomorrow), from the name of the film Giovanni is shooting, the action of which takes place in 1956, when the Soviets invade Hungary, is a verse taken from“Fischia il vento” (The Wind Whistles), an Italian partisan song, which is, along with “Bella Ciao”, one of the most famous songs of the Resistance. A lovely metaphor for this film about the desire to move forward, even in the face of strong headwinds.