Nanni Moretti's new film, based on the life of Silvio Berlusconi, reinforces his status as a cult figure of the Italian left. He talks to Paddy Agnewin Rome.
On the day I went along to interview Italian film-maker Nanni Moretti, I found him having a mid-afternoon snack at the bar of an "alimentare" foodstore just down the street from his central Rome offices.
"Ah, I'm on my way to interview you, Nanni," I said.
"I know, that's why I'm here; I'm trying to get away from you," joked Moretti by way of reply.
Winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or in 2001 for his film, The Son's Room, and one of Italy's best-known and best-loved film-makers, Moretti has a reputation for being "difficult", for being an "intense, troubled" intellectual. Colleagues will even tell you that he never gives interviews to journalists.
In reality, 54-year-old Moretti is eminently affable and approachable, whilst in conversation he offers a quotable quote with just about everything he has to say. Irish cinema buffs now have the chance to see arguably his most controversial film yet, Il Caimano(The Caiman), a film loosely based on the life and times of media tycoon and former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Il Caimanofollows a typically Moretti-style path in that it is much more than a documentary about Berlusconi. It is also the story about the viccisitudes of B-movie producer Paolo Bonomo, who is trying to make a film about Berlusconi without any money and at a time when his marriage has just broken up. As always, the autobiographical is never far from the Moretti screenplay, as his own marriage to Silvia Nono ended with a separation five years ago.
In that it recounts the rise and rise of Berlusconi, Il Caimanois a film that asks some uncomfortable questions about the last 30 years of public life in Italy. For example, in an early scene we see Berlusconi sitting at a desk, talking on the phone in a makeshift office somewhere in Italy. After a few moments, he puts down the phone, stands up and walks over to the window. A few seconds later, the office ceiling caves in as a huge, trunk-size briefcase crashes on to his desk, smashing the furniture and bursting open as thousands of lire notes float up into the air.
The huge briefcase of money that crashes through the ceiling represents some crude Moretti-style symbolism, as it is an obvious reference to what critics of Berlusconi always consider one of the "mysteries" of modern Italy: namely, where exactly did he get the money with which he launched his construction empire in the 1960s? (The film provides no answer.)
In another sense, the briefcase also symbolises Berlusconi's very presence on the stage of contemporary Italian public life. He clattered on to that stage with explosive impact 13 years ago when, in the space of just three months, he founded his centre-right Forza Italia party and immediately won the 1994 general election. As Italy's richest man and head of a multi-billion-dollar business and media empire, Berlusconi (currently leader of the opposition) remains a giant conundrum in Italian public life, someone who smilingly embodies an obvious "conflict of interest" between public office and a private media empire that assures him a 45 per cent national audience share.
Nor does Berlusconi's use of television while prime minister escape Moretti's attention. In the only scene where real archive footage is used, Il Caimanorecalls the infamous July 2003 day when then prime minister Berlusconi addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Annoyed by criticism from German Euro-MP Martin Schulz, Berlusconi told him that he knew of someone who was making a film in Italy about a Nazi concentration camp and that he would recommend him for the part of camp guard.
THAT SCENE HASa double impact. For a start, it reveals a crude and threatening side to Berlusconi, unaccustomed as he was to being asked hard questions about his business empire. For a second, for many of us, it is the first time we have seen a full version of the Schulz-Berlusconi exchange. Such was Berlusconi's hold over free-to-air televison in Italy (owning one half and controlling the other half in his role of prime minister) that few Italians have ever previously seen the full exchange. Indeed, on the day after the incident, authoritative daily Corriere Della Seracomplained that the national broadcaster had "produced a 13.30 main news bulletin that was manipulated and omissive to a grotesque extent".
"One of the things I try to say in the film is that the paths of a politician and a television entrepreneur ought to be separated. It is simply not right one person builds up around himself both political and televisual power, because obviously television today is a very powerful weapon," says Moretti.
"Even when television does not censor something, it still has a way of manipulating, either by exaggerating or, as in this case, by hiding the news. Even for people like you and me, who perhaps are more attentive to such matters, this is alarming and frightening."
In that regard, Moretti argues that while Berlusconi per se is not worrying, the seeming defencelessness of the citizen when faced with this mass media power is profoundly disturbing.
"It is remarkable that the Berlusconi story happened in a country like Italy with a strong democratic tradition," he says. "It is remarkable that one man was allowed to accumulate all this media and publishing power and then, against the law, he was allowed to enter politics and become head of government. Other democracies have laws which legislate against this blend of media and political power."
In Italy, Il Caimanowas released just days before last year's April general election, in which Berlusconi's centre-right coalition was narrowly beaten (perhaps by as few as 25,000 votes) by the centre-left coalition headed by current Italian prime minister Romano Prodi. Could it be that Moretti's film swung the pendulm, made up the minds of some "undecided" voters? Moretti thinks not, pointing out that in Italy the film received exactly the reception he expected. On the one hand, the centre-right loathed it and accused it of all manner of political incorrectness. On the other hand, the centre-left was embarrassed, since it did not want to seem to be fighting the election on an "anti-Berlusconi" ticket.
Moretti's easy, ironic but eloquent style have all helped make him a cult figure for the Italian left since the release of his film, Ecce Bombo, in 1978. Since then, he has fulfilled the role of self- appointed spokesman for a generation of post-1968 leftist sympathisers, many of whom have not only long since abandoned political activity but who have also lost faith in the current centre-left elite.
That role of leftist icon was never more underlined than when, four years ago, he found himself plunged into the forefront of Italian political life. He had gone along to attend a Saturday afternoon rally of the centre-left "Olive" coalition in Piazza Navona, in central Rome.
Many of the early speakers at the meeting - delegates, sympathisers, militants - had given vent to their frustration with the centre-left leadership, accusing it of practically handing over the country to Berlusconi and then refusing to organise serious opposition against him. They were particularly angry about his apparent attempts to undermine and intimidate magistrates investigating him on charges of corruption.
The meeting ended with speeches by two senior centre-left figures, Piero Fassino and the then opposition leader, Francesco Rutelli, speeches which appeared to have taken on board none of the objections raised by the delegates and militants.
Furious at the attitude of the party leaders, and encouraged by militants at the meeting, Moretti jumped up on to the platform and issued an angry, impassioned "J'accuse" at the fundamentally arrogant and undemocratic attitude of the movement's leaders. If you lot continue like this, he roared, it will take three or four generations for the Italian left to recover.
THE UPSHOT OFthis was that Moretti became one of the key players in an extra-parliamentary leftist mass movement, the Girotondi, which throughout 2002 campaigned vigorously against Berlusconi's alleged abuse of democracy. At one stage, it seemed as if Moretti was heading out of cinema and into politics.
Not so, however, since the urge to make films never left him. In this most recent case, the urge was to "bear witness" on film to the Berlusconi phenomenon. In that context, Moretti finds it indicative that few other Italian film-makers were interested in such subject matter. He himself is the first to admit that had he not already been an established film-maker, it would have been almost impossible to make the film, such is the intimidating presence of Berlusconi in Italy.
Nanni Moretti lives, eats and drinks cinema to the point of legendary obsessiveness. He functions not only as a film director but also as a producer, an actor and a scriptwriter, as well as being director of his own cinema in Rome, Il Nuovo Sacher, and, for the next two years, of the Turin Film Festival.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find that Moretti's next major project is to act the lead role in a friend's film. Then, too, he is one of 33 film-makers - others include Ken Loach, Michael Cimino, Claude Leluch, Jane Campion, Wim Wenders, Roman Polanski and the Coen brothers - who have been asked by the Cannes Film Festival to make a three-minute film about Cannes.
Moretti has made his Cannes offering and the experience has set him thinking about his role as a cinema spectactor, which in turn has set him thinking about a new project. A new Moretti film, as yet without a title, is on the way. As he has often said in the past, he only makes films when he has "something to say". Never was this more true than in the case of Il Caimano. Go see it.
Il Caimano (The Caiman) is showing exclusively at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin, throughout April.