“Great Magic”: a new comedy by Nanni Moretti
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The Great Magic, a neurotic author’s comedy by Nanni Moretti, is being released in Russia. The 70-year-old Italian, a leftist and cinephile, juggles with his favorite motifs, wanders through the nooks and crannies of world cinema and the history of the 20th century and creates a film that, although overloaded with film quotes and film Easter eggs, is also quite fascinating by the standards of the average viewer.
Three neorealist workers, under the cover of darkness, climb the wall of ancient Rome in order to hang from ropes and decorate it with a bloody inscription – similar anti-bourgeois slogans were dotted with many ancient walls of Western Europe during the days of unrest in 1968 – “Il sol dell’avvenire”, “The Sun of the Future” ” This is how 70-year-old Nanni Moretti effectively writes the title title into the prologue of his new film. Moretti, who is not for nothing called the Italian Woody Allen, has been directing his cinephilic and politically engaged comedies about confused intellectuals for half a century. For almost the same number of years he has been presenting these stories at Cannes competitions and once even won the Palme d’Or (in 2001 with The Son’s Room). Moretti also presented his new film at Cannes, but this time without much success: the general content of the reviews boiled down to the fact that the old man had fallen into a whim.
In English-speaking countries, the film is called “Bright Future,” but in Russia it will go under the title “Great Magic” (great magic, if anyone doesn’t know, was once called cinema). It is no coincidence that the hard workers from the prologue seemed neorealistic – these are the actors playing in a very colorfully stylized (rich colors, megawatts of artificial light, painted backdrops) film about the split that happened in the Italian Communist Party in 1956, when the Hungarians began to tear down monuments to Stalin, and then to Budapest Soviet tanks drove in. The plot of the film in the film is not so much supplemented as additionally embellished by the tour of the Hungarian circus in Rome, which, at the invitation of the local party cell, came to perform in front of Secretary General Palmiro Togliatti. With or without clowns, for the KPI, which had previously been unitedly following the indisputable Soviet course for 35 years, 1956 really was a turning point. Internal party ferment and the coming split, according to the author of this political opus, should be embodied in the fate of his main character, the secretary of the district committee: unable to cope with the growing polyphony of opinions and other contradictions of an internal and external nature, in the finale he puts his head in a noose.
It is fitting for the director to follow his hero – as most often, when Moretti makes a movie about cinema (Sweet Dreams, 1981; Dear Diary, 1993), he himself plays him. The Hungarian clowns, who in his film, with their mittens open, side by side with the Italian communists, watch as Soviet guns take aim at their fellow citizens, are bullshit compared to the mess that happens on the set. If circus elephants cannot divide the territory – the French bully the German ones, instead of bowing synchronously in Hungarian costumes – then what can we say about the people! The main actress (the radiant Czech Barbora Bobulova, whose cozy femininity makes one recall the golden age of Czechoslovak drawing-room comedy) is sure that she is playing a love story, makes a point, and in the key scene of refusing her party card, she tries to kiss the party secretary. The director’s daughter, an aspiring composer, flatly refuses to take part in the ancient ritual (at the beginning of filming, watch Jacques Demy’s clumsy debut film “Lola”, where Anouk Aimée dances and sings on the stage of a port tavern), and in addition does not want to show her father the score for his future film . However, the moment will come when her daughter’s fiancé will sing her from beginning to end at a dinner meeting her parents. The groom will be a puffy 70-year-old Polish ambassador – he is played by Jerzy Stuhr, the main actor in the first films of Krzysztof Kieślowski (The Film Lover, 1979, Gold Prize of the Moscow Film Festival).
As soon as you begin to describe The Great Magic, you realize that it is a disaster for a viewer not too familiar with auteur cinema of the 20th century. Everywhere you look, there’s a quote, and an unchewed quote at that. And if it’s funny to me, a certified graduate of VGIK in 1994, that it is precisely from watching “Lola” that my daughter runs like hell, or listening to how, having barely recovered from Ambassador Stuhr, Moretti’s hero gives a lecture to his young colleague, an aspiring director, directing taking “A Short Film About Murder” as an example, a 30-year-old viewer or just someone who has known more interesting things in his life than looking at Gena Rowlands (Gena Rowlands is here too!) will simply see on the screen a cantankerous, gouty old man who is ruining his life young, and the essence of his claims remains not only vague, but sounds like the speech of a patient in an acute psychiatric ward.
Even in his own film crew, all employees under 40 years old turn into enemies: an assistant during the reading of the script asks if it is about Russian communists in Italy. The answer is that there were 2 million communists in Italy at that time, the assistant asks to clarify whether there were 2 million Russian communists living in Italy in 1956, until Moretti begins to jump from powerlessness, impatience and the inability to explain anything to this idiot. There is already such intensity here that any viewer with a good sense of humor can really begin to get the same kind of pleasure from the film that I get from a comedy with Louis de Funès, without even delving into the essence of what is being said.
In the funniest scene of the film, Moretti simply takes the young director and his entire film crew hostage, catching him on one of the streets of Rome when he is filming the trump sequence of his action movie: one puts the other on his knees and shoots him in the forehead. Following the predictable old man’s claims, iron-clad cinephile arguments are used. Among them, for example, is that “We are obliged to love Cassavetes just because he is handsome” (Moretti himself is characterized by narcissism, from his first films – “Behold the Bomb”, 1978 – he expressed concern about his own appearance, and with In fact, they are slightly similar to Cassavetes). As a result, a prominent mathematician, Ksenia Valeri, and some gray-haired art historian are called to the set; the architect Renzo Piano comes on line from his office in the manner of an educational broadcast, each from his own bell tower explaining why the murder scene cannot be filmed like that. But the young director only freezes and bats his sleepy, empty eyes offendedly. Without getting through to Martin Scorsese, after an eight-hour siege, Moretti leaves into the dawn, and behind him the young man brings the mise-en-scène back and shoots his shot exactly as he planned. All that Moretti managed to achieve was a sleepless night and a broken voice.
However, Moretti’s hero has more serious problems than stubborn, uneducated youth. His producer wife (Margherita Bui), in parallel with his film, is also producing the picture of that sleepy young man with pistols – which causes confusion in the schedules. She also secretly visits a psychotherapist in the hope of finding the strength to leave her husband after 40 years of marriage. “I’m afraid of making a mistake and causing him to judge me – it’s exhausting. Besides, all these 40 years we have been talking about politics, about cinema, about work – just not about us.”
In relation to the real Moretti, the latter is easily explained. Born in 1953 and preparing himself for the auteur cinema that thundered throughout the world in the Italy of his youth, the times of the great leftists Bertolucci, Bellocchio and Pasolini, due to age reasons Moretti did not have time to throw Molotov cocktails or join the united march of film enthusiasts. At the age of 20, he came to the ruins when film production in Italy fell by more than half, and, deprived of the opportunity to accomplish what he was preparing for, for half a century he has not been able to talk enough about this “that” – the revolution, great cinema, etc.
But Moretti’s hero has a reason to make concessions. The threat of divorce in his old age forces him to rewrite the ending with suicide, and at the same time the history itself (as Quentin Tarantino recently rewrote the history of Hollywood): in the new edition of the script and world history, Tolyatti heeded the voice of dissenters and “Unita” came out with an editorial rejecting the hegemony of the USSR. The title “And from then on we lived happily ever after” appears, and actors from all of Moretti’s previous films appear on the screen in a single impulse. It’s just that this demonstration was filmed and looks exactly like those that crowned Stalin’s uplifting comedies like “The Circus” (1936). Even at the end of the day, the viewer of “Great Magic” cannot do without very specific knowledge. And Moretti’s surrender of positions is akin to Galileo’s remark to the side: “But still she is spinning!”
In theaters from December 21
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