A Brighter Tomorrow (Nanni Moretti, 2023) (Patreon)

Judging from the widespread disapproval A Brighter Tomorrow elicited at Cannes, it is getting harder for viewers to distinguish between Nanni Moretti, the writer-director, and Giovanni, the grumpy character he so often plays. Here, he plays an Italian director whose long career somewhat resembles Moretti's own. But if A Brighter Tomorrow is in any way a self-portrait, it's a jaundiced, even self-indicting one. Giovanni represents a particular kind of hard-bitten leftist who has grown so accustomed to being marginalized by his culture that he can only pontificate, cannot listen, and believes that he is being assailed even by his collaborators. In short, he has become a bitter old man.

The vehement rejection of A Brighter Tomorrow seems more psychological than political, much less aesthetic. Giovanni holds many of the same ethical views as the left-liberal film intelligentsia who are Moretti's audience. He goes on extended tirades about the glorification of violence in contemporary film. He bristles when Netflix executives refer to films and TV shows as "our products." And he is generally dispirited by the vapidity of culture in the late-capitalist West. But Nanni invests Giovanni with a repulsive arrogance, a tendency to hector and manipulate. He is equally annoyed by an actor's (Barbora Bobul'ová) desire to ad-lib on set as he is by her choice of footwear. ("I hate mules!") In other words, Giovanni is an angry modernist grandpa, James Quandt as played by Larry David.

If A Brighter Tomorrow is missing its targets, it could be because it tackles too much and isn't worried about linear argument. A narrative film that follows the ambling style of Moretti's essay films, this is a work that might've been better served by choosing a lane and staying there. After all, by focusing on an aging director who is losing his audience and having trouble funding his projects, Moretti opens himself up to charges of self-pity and, paradoxically, self-aggrandizement, as if he were the last teller of cinematic truth. Granted, Moretti's creative vision is steeped in the self-reflexivity endemic to Italian modernism: Pirandello, Calvino, Fellini, etc. To some extent, his thinking always operates within that matrix.

But in this case, Moretti leaves too much undone. The film Giovanni is struggling to make is about the Italian Communist Party's reaction to the 1957 Hungarian uprising, and how Gramsci's ideals were abandoned by timid Stalinist apparatchiks. A Brighter Tomorrow floats these ideas alongside the dissolution of Giovanni's marriage to his longtime producer Paolo (Margherita Buy), and a broader question of the relationship between politics and romance. This last question is the one Moretti seems to think ties everything else together, but A Brighter Tomorrow never really articulates these questions with respect to Giovanni and Paola's relationship. Moretti simply resolves their problems with an appeal to leftist hope and generosity which, while appreciated, does not resolve Paola's fundamental problem with Giovanni: that he imposes his views of the world on everybody and everything, realism be damned.

In a strange way that I'm sure even Moretti himself realizes, A Brighter Tomorrow is haunted by the action cinema Giovanni so detests. It's not just that the English title echoes A Better Tomorrow, the classic John Woo / Chow Yun-Fat bullet ballet. His depiction of Edoardo (Flavio Furno), the young Italian director Paola is producing, suggests a young Tarantino, enthusing over the Shakespearean undertones of gangland violence. The depiction is patently unfair, allowing Giovanni to talk circles around the guy. But near the end of A Brighter Tomorrow, Moretti has Giovanni end his historical film in an aggressively counterfactual manner. We are told that the ICP stood up to the Soviets, the protesters in Hungary triumphed, and that Italy has been living in a Gramscian utopia ever since. In other words, Moretti pulls a Late Tarantino, with Hitler blown up and Sharon Tate still alive.

The major flaw in A Brighter Tomorrow as I see it is that Moretti cannot achieve this conclusion organically. Giovanni chooses hope over bitterness, recognizes that love and justice are co-constitutive rather than opposed, and he / Moretti end the film with a Felliniesque parade, clearly valuing community spirit over Giovanni's avuncular arrogance. But Moretti simply imposes this ending rather than having his characters, or his concepts, arrive at it. This broader view may be preferable to sullen defeatism, but it is hardly more dialectical. It seems unfair to level too much criticism against a film in which Gramsci's portrait is marched through the city square, but Moretti set his own high standard and did not quite make the grade.