Mia Madre
Director: Nanni Moretti
Talent: Margherita Buy, John Turturro, Giulia Lazzarini Nanni Moretti
Release Date: 25th September 2015
Nanni Moretti has worked himself clear of the ‘Italian Woody Allen’ shorthand that beset his early career, partially due to the American director’s moribund output for the better part of 20 years, and partially due to the increasing versatility and individuality of Moretti’s own cinematic vision. In Mia Madre we are back in familiar-but-different Moretti territory: Margherita (Buy) is a director working on a film about an industrial dispute, starring the pompous Italian-American Barry Huggins (John Turturro) as a stubborn factory owner, while she attends to her hospitalised and perhaps terminally ill mother (Giulia Lazzarini) in the evenings with her brother, played in a low-key fashion by Moretti himself.
Margherita’s quasi-Brechtian insistence on set that her actors simultaneously play both their characters as well as the actors playing said characters has as its tragic mirror-image her inability to cope with the immediate and constantly encroaching lived reality of her mother’s mortality. It’s a neat idea that, as in the best of Moretti’s work, resonates outwards into implicating ‘the real world’ and our relationship to it. However, in Mia Madre filmmaking (or creativity more generally) is presented not as escapism (as in 1998’s wonderful Aprile) but rather ineluctably connected to and informed by one’s personal life, for better or worse.
Turturro is typically hilarious as the self-important star (and albatross around the neck) of Margherita’s ailing production, while Buy herself lends great humour and pathos to the starring role as a woman creaking under the pressure of adult life, in all its complexity. Despite an unfortunate drift into sentimentality in its final moments (typical of Moretti), Mia Madre is a compassionate and provocative film that engages in difficult questions about death and cinema in a way that crucially always preserves its emotional raison d’être.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
