Nanni Moretti’s masterstroke was to have terrified the critics with his little finger pointed at them

In Rome, amid high temperatures, attention shifts to Venice to avoid becoming overly preoccupied by the situation in Saxony: Moretti’s latest film is generating significant buzz. The last time was Palombella Rossa, thirty-seven years ago, before Occhetto’s Bolognina – when half the critics and influencers who are now explaining Moretti to me on Instagram and Substack hadn’t even been born yet. This time, I read, it’s a rom-com (that’s exactly how it’s described). A romantic comedy à la Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally, who knows. I would like to form an opinion on the film, but I already know I will not manage it. It is impossible with Moretti. American critics, as is often the case, turn up their noses: tired, full of stereotypes, dusty. One critic comes out with a malicious remark: “It’s reheated tiramisu” (Moretti fans will be up in arms: if anything, a Sacher Torte! Ignoramuses!). But they’re Americans – what do they know about Moretti? Fair enough. Let’s hear from our own lot. Much better here: “The great love story that Italian cinema was missing”, “Nanni is back”, “a masterpiece”, comparisons with Almodóvar (I read “music by Iglesias” and immediately think of Julio, but it’s actually Alexi). The same happened with Sol dell’avvenire: fourteen minutes of applause at Cannes, tears and heated debate in Italy, yet The Guardian called it “incredibly awful” and Variety deemed it “stuff only for fans.” Which side should we take?

Viewing the latest Moretti film was somewhat challenging: the tone, the performances, and the perpetual overacting—as is often the case with Italian cinema—combined with Moretti’s stylistic device of ‘acting whilst pretending to act badly’ did not resonate with me (a personal limitation, I acknowledge, for the record). I will watch this one as well. But more than the film itself, what now intrigues me is the ‘Moretti effect’: those reactions that are always somewhat hysterical, that cult—incredibly strong in France, strong here too—which no longer has anything to do with the films, but with Moretti alone. The classic explanation for the Moretti cult has always been his affiliation with the left, the sense of recognition, the mirror: Moretti as the totem of a family album broader than Campo Largo. But the family album isn’t enough. It doesn’t explain it. It no longer satisfies me; it has always been a shortcut. My non-empirical theory is another: namely, the fear of Nanni Moretti. Over all these years – and this is his masterpiece – Moretti has built a public persona that also functions as the guardian of his own films. A Morettian moral police force whereby, in the end, it is no longer the critics who judge Moretti but he who judges the critics. Read certain reviews by Italian or French critics—not American or British ones: they seem to have been written by someone who saw him emerge from the screen halfway through a screening, as in The Purple Rose of Cairo, or the Moretti from Dear Diary who tortures the critic. There he is, pointing his little finger: ‘Did you even understand my film? Don’t you think it’s brilliant that someone like me is making a romantic comedy right now? Do you realise who I am, and who you are? Even the scathing reviews, when there are any, always come across as affectionate, restrained, with a vague sense of guilt – he’s let us down, he’s not himself anymore, it must be a passing phase, let’s wait and see – the tone of someone reprimanding a relative, a member of the family. And the family, as we know, is a small one. Apart from a few isolated critics (such as Mariarosa Mancuso, who writes from exile in Switzerland and can say whatever she likes), sooner or later here you find yourself caught up in Moretti’s ‘six degrees of separation’ – an evening at the Nuovo Sacher, a film series at the Cinémathèque, a bistro in Monteverde Vecchio (but not at Lavitola’s), a friend who is the brother of the cousin of a screenwriter for an old Moretti film.

At film festivals, the phenomenon is more pronounced than ever. There, Moretti’s followers are scattered everywhere, moving in unison like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Encountering them makes forming an independent opinion of the film as difficult as asking the editorial team of ‘Report’ what they think of Ranucci. But the anti-Moretti camp is not in a better position: theirs, too, is an obsession, an excess of attention that extends well beyond the film. The French are in the worst state of all: for thirty years, Moretti has been held up as a critical conscience, an antidote to the vulgarity of the present. Moretti is like the white canvas on a white background in *Arte*, Yasmina Reza’s play – the whiter it is, the more everyone sees whatever they want in it. This spell works less well with the British and Americans. The French, on the other hand, went so far as to award the Palme d’Or to La stanza del figlio – a film not even Goffredo Fofi liked – preferring it to Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Haneke’s La Pianiste. Now, take your time and watch all three again. Then we’ll talk about them. A mixed verdict, it was said at the time. But on that jury sat Mimmo Calopresti, a product of the ‘factory’, a devotee and evangelist of ‘Morettism’. Just imagine the look on his face if he’d returned to Rome with Moretti coming back from Cannes empty-handed.