Review of Nanni Moretti’s film “The Great Magic” (Il sol dell’avvenire)

Nanni Moretti’s film The Great Magic (Il sol dell’avvenire) has been released and premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. In it, the director talks about himself in the art of cinema and about the art of cinema in himself. He talks about what comes out of this Julia Shagelman.

The past year has been surprisingly rich in new works by far from young directors: from “The Palace” by 90-year-old Roman Polanski to, for example, “Ferrari” by 80-year-old Michael Mann. The media were quick to call some of these films the last. Some of them really seem to be summing up the results, others confirm that their authors are at least true to themselves, even if they are not going to say anything new, others – that, despite their advanced age, they are in excellent creative shape and can still surprise viewers .

The Italian Nanni Moretti is still young by the director’s standards – he is only seventy. But for some reason, his new picture, despite the optimistic title (in the original it is “The Sun of the Future”), looks exactly like a summing up and almost like the creative testament of a tired master, who is tired of everything in the world and the only thing that still gives him pleasure , is an opportunity to spit venom at today’s youth, who, of course, do everything wrong.

So, director Giovanni (played by Moretti himself, who gave the character his full name) is preparing to shoot his next film, the heroes of which should be the communists of the 1950s. “Russians, or what?” – asks the young assistant. No, Giovanni explains, there were two million communists in Italy at that time. “Two million Russians lived in Italy?” — the assistant continues to be perplexed, and Giovanni begins to boil.

But his troubles do not end with stupid questions: one of the actresses comes to the reading in mules; his beloved wife, who is also the permanent producer of his films (Margherita Bui), for the first time in her life is going to combine work on his project with another, an action film by a young upstart (Flavio Furno); the daughter (Valentina Romani), also for the first time, refuses to participate in the family ritual before the start of filming – watching Jacques Demy’s film “Lola”. And Giovanni experiences each of these events with the same dramatic intensity.

But then it will be even worse: it turns out that the daughter is dating the Polish ambassador (Jerzy Stuhr), who is older than Giovanni himself, the French producer (Mathieu Amalric) will waste the film’s budget and end up in jail, and the wife, having gained courage in sessions with a psychologist, will finally will announce to the hero his desire to get a divorce. And then the actress of his film (Barbora Bobulova) believes that she is playing in a love melodrama, although in fact we are talking about a split in the Italian Communist Party after the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest in 1956 and no romance is provided for in the script.

But the main thing is that absolutely no one, except, of course, Giovanni himself, no longer treats cinema as art or, if you like, great magic, chasing only commercial gain. This sad state of affairs should be demonstrated by two episodes that were intended to be satirical, but turned out to be completely unfunny.

In one of them, Giovanni appears on the set of that same action movie and tries to explain to his young colleague how bad and banal the mise-en-scène he has built with references to authorities from Renzo Piano (appears in the frame in person) to Martin Scorsese (Giovanni tries to call him, but gets caught to answering machine). Despite the cinephile quotes, you mostly feel awkward from this divertissement.

In another episode, Giovanni turns to Netflix in search of funding. Of course, it turns out that only soulless capitalists work there, concerned only with the viewing figures for their content – there is, of course, some truth in this, but criticizing streaming has become so commonplace that it is impossible for Moretti to extract at least one witty joke from it.

The ideal for both the author and the hero remains the great cinema of the past, of which they both consider themselves heirs. However, “Grand Magic”, consisting of a chaotic jumble of allusions, references and defiantly naive political ideas, can hardly serve as proof of the validity of these claims. One of the main references for the film was Fellini’s “Eight and a Half” – excerpts from them are even shown on the screen. But if both there and in “The Great Magic” the directors managed to overcome the crisis, then what will happen to Moretti himself is a big question after this film.