one of Nanni Moretti’s finest films

There is no age to be an old fart. Nanni Moretti started young, at a time when we did not speak of “boomer”. The actor and filmmaker has always looked at the world with an uncompromising and heartbroken nostalgia. But his melancholy has always given way to irony, and sometimes to a jubilation which gives his cinema a paradoxical and exhilarating vitality.

Towards a bright future is in this one of his most beautiful films, with sovereign intranquillity. Big forgotten of the prize list at the last Cannes Film Festival, one could say that it is purely “Morettian”. This would mean that it is frozen, while on the contrary it shows the page of time and the difficulty of accepting it. Moretti is staged in the guise of a renowned filmmaker, Giovanni. When he is not riding an electric scooter, he is filming a film set in 1956, when the Soviets invade Budapest. Its scenario imagines a Hungarian circus ping through Rome. Through this marquee populated by elephants and acrobats…