Cannes diary part eight

Dave Calhoun reports that polical satire is alive and well on the Croisette.

May 22 2006

Filmmakers who look to battle the political status quo from the left often face the same problems: how to preach beyond the converted? How to reach an audience beyond those who laugh knowingly and with self-satisfaction at your put-downs? How to avoid immediate sighs of exasperation from those who don't share your views exactly?

Nowhere is this more difficult now than in America (witness the half-cocked attempts screening here in Cannes, 'Fast Food Nation' and 'Southland Tales') but Italy, thankfully, has a long tradition of political filmmaking of the left and Nanni Moretti, whose new film 'Il Caimano' screens in Cannes tonight, has been an outspoken critic of Berlusconi ever since his election.

Moretti has now done an interesting and quite successful job at both tackling these filmmaking conundrums and directly attacking Berlusconi and his social legacy in 'Il Caimano', a satirical drama which was released to much box-office success in Italy just before this year's presidential elections.

Moretti's film adopts a daring mix of satire, light comedy and family drama to ease the passage of his serious political purpose, which is to lampoon Berlusconi personally and politically and, more subtly, to convey something of the crisis of the little man when faced with a corrupt governmental power such as Berlusconi.

Bruno Bunomo (Silvio Orlando) is a B-movie producer on the skids. It's been some time since the success of the delicious sounding 'Mocassini Assassini' (a North African thriller, presumably) and his new film 'Cataracts', which mixes Marxist-Leninist ideas with violent schlock, looks a shocker from the trashy clips we are privy to.

An inexperienced but pleasant young writer-director, Teresa (Jasmine Trinca) attempts to break this impasse by offering Bruno a new script of hers called 'Il Caimano' which in turn Bruno pitches to a television station without even reading properly. It's only when he meets Teresa later that he realizes with exasperation that it's what he calls a 'lefty political film' and is a barely veiled attack on Berlusconi ('That's not a film, that's public
knowledge,' says a guy at the TV station reacting to its content).

At first reluctant, Bruno decides more out of pragmatism than political will to make the film - but still has to battle the wariness of cowardly financiers and vain actors who shy away from the material or want to alter it to make Berlusconi (and themselves) look more palatable.

What emerges from all this is a satire on both the film industry and filmmakers such as Moretti himself who wish to deal with politics but first have to overcome their own and other people's prejudices towards such a pursuit. All the time, scenes from Teresa's script punctuate the drama: what we see is more direct, more damning and more personal satire as we see a tanned and smarmy version of Berlusconi behave badly in court at his own trial for corruption.

Parallel to all this, Bruno's personal life takes a turn for the worse. He and his wife, Paola (Margherita Buy) decide on an amicable split and tell their two children as such. Bruno takes it badly, stalking his wife as she performs at a concert, destroying a gift from her and falling into depression. There's a quite devastating scene when the two drive away from the signing of their divorce and drive in different lanes of the same road to the sound of Damien Rice's 'The Blower's Daughter' (which also popped up in 'Closer' last year). The effect is to contrast Berlusconi's power with the suffering of the everyman.

The breakdown of the state becomes the breakdown of the family. It's a powerful device that allows Moretti's satire to enter the heart as well as the brain.

If calling Nanni Moretti's new film 'The Caiman' a 'leftie weepie' sounds like a put-down, it shouldn't. Moretti doesn't quite transfer the political to the personal as devastatingly as Michael Haneke did recently with 'Hidden', but he sidesteps a direct critique of Berlusconi to show instead the slow crushing of an ordinary man in the shadow of Berlusconi.

When he finally does offer a direct blow to Berlusconi's politics and personality - in a final scene in which Moretti himself plays Berlusconi - it's all the more devastating.

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