Writer-director Nanni Moretti and Margherita Buy play siblings dealing with an ailing mother in MIA MADRE
MIA MADRE (MY MOTHER) (Nanni Moretti, 2015)
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., 212-757-2280
Opens Friday, August 26
www.musicboxfilms.com
Several times throughout Nanni Moretti’s semiautobiographical Mia Madre, film director Margherita (Margherita Buy) says, “The actor must be next to the character.” It’s a line that Moretti, the Italian writer, director, and actor behind such international successes as Caro Diario and Palme d’Or winner The Son’s Room, has said that he uses all the time. It’s a concept that lies at the heart of Moretti’s latest, brilliantly intimate work, inspired by his own career and the death of his mother. Buy was named Best Actress at Cannes for her intense performance as Margherita, a divorced mother who is having difficulty balancing fiction and reality. She is making a film about an employee uprising at a factory run by a coldhearted boss, played by self-obsessed Italian American actor Barry Huggins (John Turturro), who keeps forgetting his lines and claims to have worked with Stanley Kubrick. Margherita is shuttling back and forth between the film shoot and the hospital, where her mother, Ada (Giulia Lazzarini), is slowly fading. A former teacher, Ada lights up only when discussing Latin with her granddaughter, Livia (Beatrice Mancini), Margherita’s teenage daughter, while Margherita has a difficult time communicating with both of them as well as with her ex-boyfriend, Vittorio (Enrico Ianniello), an actor in her movie. And Margherita’s brother, Giovanni (Moretti), has taken a leave of absence from his job in order to help take care of their mother. Margherita drifts in and out of what is real as imagined scenarios play out in her mind, but it is not always immediately clear what is happening in the film and what is happening in the film-within-a-film, with an additional layer of uncertainty because Moretti himself is often onscreen, further blurring the distinction of life versus cinema.
John Turturro is a problematic actor in Nanni Moretti’s MIA MADRE
Winner of the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Cannes, Mia Madre continues Moretti’s masterful exploration of the human condition through deeply personal narratives, even if they’re not fully autobiographical. Buy (A Five Star Life, Moretti’s We Have a Pope and The Caiman), who has won seven David di Donatello Awards (including a Best Actress trophy for Mia Madre) and has been nominated for another nine, is spellbinding as Margherita, carrying the complex film with her every look and gesture. It’s a dazzling, bravura performance, charged with powerful, raw emotion. Turturro (Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, Passione) has a ball as the cranky ugly American who is not about to publicly admit his failings. Moretti, who wrote the script with Francesco Piccolo and Valia Santella, serves as a steady, calming influence as Giovanni, a soft-spoken man who understands the situation and always knows the right thing to do, which is not true of his sister. Mia Madre is a mesmerizing examination of family, grief, connection, and the very act of creation itself, in all its many forms and possibilities.