Nanni Moretti (2015)
The main character in Mia Madre (My Mother) is Margherita (Margherita Buy), a film director. At a press conference, a journalist suggests that Margherita has, unlike many of her contemporaries, continued to make films about social issues rather than with more personal themes. The movie she is currently shooting is no exception: it’s about an Italian factory and the impact on its workforce of an American entrepreneur, who takes the business over. But while the subject of Margherita’s latest picture is socio-political, she is preoccupied on the shoot by what’s going on in her own life. Her elderly mother Ada (Giulia Lazzarini), a retired classical scholar, is in hospital, and dying. The tone of Mia Madre is gently elegiac as Nanni Moretti, who co-wrote the screenplay with Francesco Piccolo and Valia Santella, alternates scenes on the set of Margherita’s film with exchanges between her and other family members, at the hospital and in each other’s homes. Moretti’s film is smooth, elegant, even-paced and unimaginative. The profession of the protagonist naturally makes you wonder if Mia Madre is autobiographical; if it is, that may partly explain the piece’s restraint. The parent-at-death’s-door storyline speaks to the personal experience of many of us: since that personal experience is likely to be enduringly powerful it may, for some people, add emotional meaning and turbulence to what’s on screen. But, without this fortifying element supplied by the viewer’s own autobiography, Mia Madre is undernourished. It brings to mind the title of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of her mother’s death, Une mort très douce – but de Beauvoir’s use of the word ‘gentle’ in the title was ironic.
In the course of the story, Margherita learns from others some uncomfortable truths (or, at least, firmly held opinions) about the way she treats people and causes them to behave. This beautiful, soft-featured woman is accused – chiefly by Vittorio (Enrico Ianniello), a man with whom she’s recently ended a relationship – of being cold and ungenerous. She has a teenage daughter, Livia (Beatrice Mancini), from a marriage that failed. The conversations in the film certainly suggest that Margherita lacks the humour of her shrewd, witty mother and her wry, defeated brother Giovanni (Moretti). But there’s no real exploration of these family relationships and it’s less than clear why Margherita seems so lacking in confidence on the film shoot. If this uncertainty as a director is meant to express the off-set tensions she’s struggling with, it’s both an obvious and an unpersuasive way of doing so. Margherita wants her actors to inhabit the characters they’re playing but also to see them ‘standing beside’ their character. This puzzles the actors but you want to hear more of what Margherita means, and it’s a letdown when she says she doesn’t really know. Otherwise, the film-within-the-film sequences suggest that Margherita’s movie-making sensibility is uninterestingly conventional, except in one bizarre piece of casting.
The role of the hard-nosed American boss is being played by Barry Huggins (John Turturro) – a caricature of an arrogant Hollywood star. It’s surprising that Barry would be keen to work with Margherita unless he needed the work more badly than is suggested; it’s even more surprising that the supposedly sensitive, tasteful film-maker she’s meant to be would want this reliably unreliable egomaniac in her movie. Mia Madre is such a civilised affair that Barry Huggins seems a gatecrasher but Nanni Moretti may have figured – not without reason – that he needed an injection of vulgar energy. There were only a couple of bits of John Turturro’s performance as Barry that I liked. The first was his baffled reaction when Margherita momentarily confides in this outsider about what’s happening in her personal life: she asks – almost imploring him for an answer – what will happen to her mother’s volumes of Lucretius and Tacitus when she’s dead. The second was Turturro’s dance at a celebration of Barry’s birthday that Margherita’s film crew arrange. Plenty of other people in Curzon Richmond, however, sounded as if they were enjoying Turturro’s turn more continuously – they were probably relieved by its crude vitality, just as Moretti intended.
Most of the playing in Mia Madre is a good deal subtler than this: Giulia Lazzarini and Moretti himself are particularly good. There are some acutely observed moments. Margherita buys food for Ada before visiting her in hospital but puts this special treat back in her bag as soon as Giovanni, who’s also visiting, automatically takes the lead in deciding their mother’s menu for the evening. Staying in Ada’s apartment, Margherita opens the door to a young salesman from an electricity company. He’s pushy enough to insist that Margherita find one of her mother’s electricity bills as evidence of how much less she’d pay if she changed suppliers; in the process of searching for a bill, Margherita becomes so upset that the salesman is soon anxious to escape. Margherita’s rueful but conscientious selection of the right dress for Ada to wear in her coffin is touching and convincing. But the calmly melancholy rhythm of the film’s movement mutes the distressing substance of Mia Madre. Even Margherita’s anxious daydreams and nightmares seem to be integrated into the thin, decorous texture.
1 October 2015
