fabiosciarra-1 Review of A Brighter Tomorrow

A Brighter Tomorrow (2023)

Hard to believe, but in the end, Moretti's cinema meets Tarantino's

[7/10 · 13 May 2023]

Nanni Moretti's 'A Brighter Tomorrow' is a film that's difficult to interpret for those who haven't followed the author's entire artistic journey. In the film, the Italian director and actor stages himself completely, his obsessions, and his quirks, in a fully conscious and often self-deprecating manner, exaggerating the worst aspects of his character and intellectual verve to the point of shattering his marital life and the very film he is trying to complete. Essentially, between fiction and reality, Moretti seems to be so obsessed with his own obsessions that he stages his own suicide. But just before plunging us into an extremely dark and pessimistic ending, Moretti, much like Quentin Tarantino, acknowledges cinema's power, and perhaps duty, to change history, to make the audience dream, and to still give them the hope of a better future, if not in reality then at least on the big screen. It's really hard to rate this film, not only for the disarming clarity with which Nanni Moretti presents himself but also because, being a film designed primarily for his fans, none of them can complain that this Moretti film is, in an almost suffocating way, a film about Moretti and his 70th year, when all that remains of the 'splendid forty-year-old' we saw in 'Dear Diary' are memories and some regrets.