Picture of the movie Tre Piani (Three Floors) © DR
Nanni Moretti and the cracks in the Italian middle class
After the intimate Mia Madre (My Mother) (2015), the undisputed master of Italian autofiction returns to the Competition with a feature film adapted from a novel by Israeli author Eshkol Nevo. Tre Piani (Three Floors) examines the beating heart of three families living on three separate floors of a building in Rome.
Six years ago, Nanni Moretti laid himself bare in Mia Madre, a profoundly spare and modest drama, nourished as much by the trials of his professional and family life as by his inner questionings. As with The Son's Room – Palme d'Or in 2001 – the director had pushed the social and political concerns of his filmography into the background to focus on the moods of his characters. And, through them, he confides openly in us.
Three years after the side step that was Santiago (2018), his first documentary, the eternal figurehead of Italian cinema was back with Tre Piani (Three Floors), a fiction adapted from the eponymous novel by Israeli author Eshkol Nevo. Three families live in a building in the suburbs of Rome. Among them are Lucio, a father worried about his seven-year-old daughter, Monica, a mother-to-be consumed by loneliness, and Andrea, a twenty-year-old whose life is turned upside down after a night of drunkenness.
In this gallery of characters played by the greatest Italian actors of the moment – Margherita Buy, Alba Rohrwacher and Riccardo Scarmacio among them – Nanni Moretti plays Vittorio, a judge who is no longer understood by his son and no longer understands him. Unlike some of his other films, which scrutinised his anxieties and obsessions head-on, Nanni Moretti's camera is more of an observer here and never judges.
With Tre Piani, the wryly humorous filmmaker captures the difficulty of being a good citizen and shows to what extent the latter is only an extension of the intimate existence that we build. By filming this mosaic of shaken beings, symbolising the fragility of the unity of the Italian people, Nanni Moretti proves once again that his love for his country remains as tenacious as ever.
