A Brighter Tomorrow

Moretti has once again found a way to make a picture that creates edgy comedy out of a process of self-therapy. Some will find the exercise wearyingly self-centred, but that’s to miss the point of a film which turns one man’s obsessions into a comedie humaine.

It’s not very clear if the director-actor-writer-producer has anything vitally important to add to his filmography in this narratively complex, generally downbeat work. What comes through most strongly is a striking sense of loss and disappointment in the character he plays, an aging man whose despair seems very personal and tinges the whole film (which is theoretically a Morettian comedy) with sadness and bitter farewells.

Giovanni may be the main character of A Brighter Tomorrow — a conceit shamelessly lifted from Fellini’s “8 1/2” — but Moretti pokes fun at himself, privileging other characters’ points of view as well.

For every engaging character-driven moment or bit of warm humor (Giovanni angrily shouting “I’m going to call Martin Scorsese” certainly got the audience in Cannes laughing), there’s unearned, even irritating quirkiness.

The film’s wistful hope for the future of cinema and its healing power ends up being too self-satisfied to register as an expression of collective faith.

A Brighter Tomorrow may be soaked in nostalgia, but it’s a nostalgia with a reactionary twang. Its title, in retrospect, feels oddly ironic. This is a screed from a director unwilling to look at the future with more than just contempt, where the “tomorrow” is really just a rose-tinted fantasia of long gone past.

Everything about it is heavy-handed and dull: the non-comedy, the ersatz-pathos, the anti-drama.