Director: Nanni Moretti
Writers: Nanni Moretti, et al.
Production Co.: Sacher Film, Fandango, LePacte
Starring: Margherita Buy, John Turturro
About 2 weeks ago, I booked this movie because of John Turturro because I just wanted to watch as many film as possible. Only during the first 10 minutes, I realized this was Nanni Moretti's film. More surprisingly, I didn't expect to see Nanni Moretti and John Turturro at the theater! Therefore this experience was so delightful for me.
Although Moretti announced that Mia Madre is a film about (his) mother, it is obviously more complicated than he mentioned. The main character is a female director and she stars an Italian-American actor, Barry Huggins(John Turturro) in her film(maybe like Alec Guinness in Star Wars?). Throughout the entire film, she persists reality but her actors and crews disappoints her, and especially Barry, who I guess the heroine spent a huge amount of effort to cast, shows the clumsiest performance during shooting.
However, this is not merely her co-workers' problem. Paradoxically, she is the core of all problem. Comically, she consistently orders her actors to fulfill two things at the same time: to be the character, and to be next to the character. No one understands her trope, and even it is revealed that she herself wasn't understanding what she said. Her manipulation of reality to convey realism ironically fails her. At the crest of conflict, Barry throws away props and says "I am gonna go back. Back to reality!"
This film-in-the-film is important because Moretti's narrative discourse is, unlike the heroine's storytelling, incidental and less pipelined. The most significant example for this is the sequence before and after Barry's birthday scene. In a scene, the heroine and her brother(Nanni Moretti) discuss their mother's death. Right after the scene, her film crew celebrate Barry's birthday. Moretti shows this birthday scene for quite a long time. It seems Moretti wants to tell us our life and emotion don't have a linear, one-way structure.
<Content of Q&A Session>
* Moretti came up with this film's idea at the end of We Have Pope, cuz his mother passed away right after We Have Pope's production.
* Moretti came up with this film's idea at the end of We Have Pope, cuz his mother passed away right after We Have Pope's production.
* Moretti permitted John Turturro to improvise in many scenes, especially the dance scene. When Moretti asked him if he needed a choreographer, Turturro said "No, thank you."
* Moretti said he wanted to avoid a film which explains too much via dialogue. So the backdrops of the heroine's ex-wife and brother is not explicit.
* Moretti said he would not like to theorize his own movie. Instead, he would let other to do so.
