Le caïman

Much touted as Moretti's 'Berlusconi' movie, (and it does end, somewhat chillingly, on the trial when the 'film-within-the-film' has taken over completely), "Il Caimano" is a sweeter, darker, more personal film than the Berlusconi tag might suggest. Indeed the infamous PM isn't really a character at all, or rather that is all he is, a character in a film script. Instead, it's all about Bruno, a director of very cheesy exploitation pictures who hasn't had a hit in years and whose marriage has also gone down the tubes who suddenly finds himself energized again when a radical young lesbian presents him with a script which turns out to be a searing indictment of Berlusconi, (well, maybe not that searing). The film is about Bruno's efforts to get the bloody thing made in a conservative Italian film industry scared of its own shadow.

It's at its best in the domestic scenes and not in the film-making parodies, (which already have been done to death), and Moretti shows a real empathy for all concerned. Bruno, in particular, is beautifully played by Silvio Orlando as a basically sad, fat, unattractive little man bemoaning his lot yet finding a kind of redemption by making the one 'serious' film of his career. When finally he is able to finance a punchy film centering on the end of the trial the film-within-the-film shifts up a gear leaving us in no doubt where Moretti's sympathies lie.

I'd been looking forward to seeing this movie for so long I was bound to be slightly disappointed. And indeed I was. But I loved parts of it all the same. Silvio Orlando's performance as a bankrupt producer, for one, was magnificent. I thought his three or four minutes in "Aprile" were the highlight of that movie, and in "The Son's Room" he practically stole the show. So I was delighted to see Moretti giving him a leading role. Throughout the movie, you can see on his face the effect of the blows and of the suffering that have been his lot, but despite it all he's good-hearted and optimistic and enthusiastic about his work. The depiction of his growing friendship with the young director played by Trinca is also moving and natural.

And while our Italian friends may be known worldwide for their cultivation of "il dolce farniente," "Il caimano" happens to be a celebration of the joys of work. Some of its finest scenes are simply depictions of Orlando's producer talking to the people he needs to talk to get his movie made. In "The Son's Room," too, some of the best scenes involved Moretti's therapist at work, talking to his patients (one of them played by Silvio Orlando, as it happens). And now that I think about it, some of the Italian books I've been reading lately (by Primo Levi and Laura Grimaldi) also celebrate work. Strange. And here I was thinking that the only people who loved work in Europe were the Germans ("Arbeit macht frei" and all that).

Mindful of the gruesome fate of the critic in the B-movie excerpt shown at the beginning of "The Crocodile," I'll remain silent, for the most part, about the things I didn't like as much. But I still can't help wondering why our Italian friends throw such hissy fits about this former prime minister of theirs. Did his companies launder millions in ill-gotten gains? Did he corrupt the judiciary and the police and muzzle his critics? Did he make a whole generation of Italians cynics? Who cares! That's what politicians are supposed to do, isn't it? At least his government had the guts to ban smoking in bars and restaurants, and for that alone he can steal all the millions he wants!

Il Caimano belongs to the Nanni Moretti style of film-making that I prefer, film-making with the imaginative uniqueness, delightfully neurotic smart-ass polemic and personal flair of Palombella Rossa, as opposed to the near-documentary style of the (albeit very pleasant, but a tad too autobiographical) Aprile, or the more traditional drama of La Stanza Del Figlio. Il Caimano opens with a sequence very reminiscent of Bianca: a grotesque Communist party gathering in what looks very much like a classroom from the "Marilyn Monroe" high school featured in that surreal 1983 movie. It's a scene from "Cataracts", a B-movie produced by Bruno Bonomo (played with gusto by Moretti regular, the Neapolitan actor Silvio Orlando), responsible also for such "gems" as "Assassin Mocassins", "Maciste against Freud" and "Susy the Misogynist". Bruno is a bumbling, likable fool of a producer on the brink of professional and marital failure (Margherita Buy, a delightful 40+ Italian actress perhaps best known outside of Italy for the female lead in Ozpetek's Le Fate Ignoranti, plays his estranged wife, Paola).

One night, while settling into the lonely, make-shift bed Bruno sets up for himself in his office in the first phase of his marital separation, he is deeply struck by a screenplay a young director, Teresa, has given him in the hope of funding her first full-length feature, Il Caimano... Absurdly, Bruno decides to produce it without having read the screenplay in its entirety and more importantly, before having realised that "the caiman" of the title was none other than Berlusconi! Though this may surprise some, as Moretti himself has famously said, this movie isn't really about Berlusconi. This said, the sequences in which Bruno imagines some scenes from Teresa's movie do indeed re-enact familiar episodes in the rise to wealth and power of Italy's richest citizen, most notably the court-room scenes (at one point the Berlusconi character is accused of "going into politics in order not to go to jail"). Not to mention some real footage including Berlusconi's "joke" regarding a German member of the European Parliament being "perfect" for the role of a Nazi guard in a film (as an Italian citizen re-watching such footage makes you want to be instantly swallowed by the depths of the earth, but it's actually worth staying on the surface just to study the look of stunned, mortified, murderous embarrassment spreading onto Fini, Italy's then-vice-PM's face as his "boss" cracks the infamous "joke"!). Nanni's (as opposed to Teresa's) Il Caimano is about the creative process of an artist. It's also a disillusioned comment on a certain kind of Italian left-wing citizen that has arisen from Berlusconi's Italy, whom Nanni's cameo character in the movie describes in less than flattering terms for their spinelessness and pettiness. Artistic integrity, the power of money (not just Berlusconi's, but what wealth stands for in the creative process), and last but not least, personal and artistic success and failure are also other important themes present in the movie. Some comments on this board also include homosexuality and gay parenting as a theme of the movie, but to me these two elements were included into the story in such a matter-of-fact way, that they were no more thematic than a Julia Roberts romantic comedy is about heterosexuality.

Moretti is in top form as far as visual humour is concerned: the sequence of a gigantic suit-case-full of Italian banknotes from the 1970s falling through the ceiling and crashing onto a desk in the middle of an office, amid the earnest question: "Where did all that money come from?!", is among the most memorable of the last five years that I've seen. There's much of the trademark Moretti photographic flair in Il Caimano: a child's feet treading a sea of gawdily colourful lego pieces strewn all over a floor as if he were a fakir walking on hot coals, a group of young men and women gently swaying to Rachid Taha's infectious North African rhythms while painting the walls of the film set representing key moments in Berlusconi's life, a nocturnal scene with a reconstruction of one of Christopher Columbus's caravels "sailing" down a Roman Avenue called Cristoforo Colombo (only a Roman would know this!)… there's even a nod to Fellini in the sequences of a historic movie being filmed on a beach just outside Rome, reminiscent of Lo Sceicco Bianco both in humour and visuals… Il Caimano boasts some noteworthy performances (though I found some of the minor players a bit wooden): Teresa is played by Jasmine Trinca, a bright young star of contemporary Italian cinema, first seen playing Nanni Moretti's daughter in La Stanza del Figlio and then, to great critical acclaim, the mentally disturbed Giorgia in La Meglio Gioventù (The Best of Youth). Michele Placido, a performer I have never considered a favourite, has a ball playing the comically repulsive actor who is first cast to play Berlusconi in Teresa's movie, and is very funny in the process. Polish star Jerzy Stuhr, known to international audiences for the lead roles in Kieslowski's Three Colours: White, and Dekalog 10, plays the rich Polish producer Sturavsky, a chorus-like character who provides the bemused "foreigner's" point of view on the absurd Italian situation (an essential Nanni ingredient – in Aprile, for instance, it was a French journalist who covered that role…)

For all its delightful humour Il Caimano is also (predictably) a bitter movie, and also a deeply allegorical one (see the final sequences for instance). On whether Berlusconi will win the next elections (meaning the ones that have just passed), Nanni Moretti's cameo character prophetically says: "He has already won" – according to this movie and Nanni Moretti himself, the caiman's steady, corrosive action onto Italian culture which has been dumbed down beyond recognition, the damage he has inflicted on all aspects of life that'll take decades to mend, the opportunistic cynicism he has left as a legacy to his citizens, are battles that he has steadily been winning for the last 20 years.

Those familiar with Nanni Moretti know that, even when Moretti tackles political issues, he does so in such a personal, unusual way. This film is a vehement pamphlet against Berlusconi. Without going at lengths to describe the various reasons why Berlusconi is, to put it in the words of "The Economist", "unfit to lead Italy", Moretti shows the peculiar mixture of demagoguery and cynical opportunism that in his opinion are Berlusconi's hallmarks as both a businessman (before he entered politics) and a politician. Moretti seems to interpret Berlusconi as a symptom of the undoing of Italian society, its values, its way of life, an involution that he traces back to the way television (and in particular the kind of TV programmes that have been the staple of Berlusconi's televisions) has moulded Italian society and the set of tastes and values that in his opinion now prevail in among Italians. The director seems to believe that, for the moment, only a sort of personal resistance is possibile against such a disruption; the court magistrate, to some extent the main character and especially the young, inexperienced and yet talented and quietly tenacious young director, with her trust in the quality and importance of her ideas, are symbols of this resistance. A tough, difficult, dry, and yet thought-provoking film that deserves to be seen by both Italians and foreigners wanting to understand today's Italy better.

Well, what do you make of that? 'Il Caimano' is certainly different! It has a magnificent central performance by Silvio Orlando, who makes the whole film work. He plays a man who is trying to make a film about Berlusconi, and his performance is heart-breaking and poignant, funny, compassionate, sad, desperate, all of those things, as his life unravels around him but he keeps on smiling. It is rare that an actor gets such a chance, and Orlando delivers everything which could possibly have been expected of him, and far more besides. His estranged wife is played by Margherita Buy, with just the right level of exasperation. The film is also enlivened by the charm of Jasmine Trinca, a gamine creature like a sleek young cat, and the lanky figure of a boy, who looks wonderingly around her and seems to be seeing the world for the first time. There is much less about Berlusconi in this film than one might have expected. The film is really about the film-maker. Nanni Moretti, the director, has taken a rather eccentric mixed salad approach towards the story, throwing bits of lettuce and cucumber and tomato and slices of yellow pepper in, mixing it up with a very fine dressing, and has produced a delectable feast. It may be all mixed up, but we like it. Dino Risi's 90th birthday is mentioned (he is now 92). This film has the same carefree air of Risi's 1960s classic, 'Il Surpasso'. A fair amount of political satire appears in the film, and Berlusconi is shown both in genuine TV clips and in staged scenes, where he is played by three different actors, which has the eerie effect of reminding us that he would like to be 'all things to all men', and also be 'whatever or whoever you want'. Do not all politicians want to be whoever you want them to be? 'Just love me', or failing that, 'at least elect me, but whatever you do, don't reject me'. Somehow, the strange slapdash manner of Moretti's film suits the subject. After all, Italian politics is a hundred times more chaotic than even the most peculiar film about it could ever be.