By MARIAROSARIA FABRIS*
Considerations about Il sol dell'avvenire (The best is yet to come), film by Nanni Moretti
The expression "the sole of the avenue” (“the sun of the future”) is often associated with The wind blows (The wind blows), as was the case, for example, with Gian Luca Pisacane and Carolina Iacucci in Italy, or, among us, with Eduardo Escorel. This is the song of the Garibaldi Brigades, groups of supporters communists who participated in the fight against the Nazi-fascist forces, in the final period of the Second World War in Italy: “Fischia il vento e infuria la bufera, / scarpe rotte e pur bisogna andar / a conquerre la rossa Primavera / dove sorge il sol dell'avvenir ” (The wind blows and the storm intensifies / broken shoes, however it is necessary to go / conquer the red spring / in which the sun of the future appears).[1]
In fact, the expression emerged “officially” in the socialist context, as it is associated with the Canto dei lavoratori (original title) or Inno I gave laboratori, also known as Inside the Italian operation party: “Su fratelli, su compagne, / su, venite in fitta schiera: / sulla libera bandiera / splende il sol dell'avvenir” (Strength brothers, strength comrades, / strength, come in closed ranks: / in the free flag / shines the sun of the future).
According to a document from the State Archives of Bologna, the Lega dei Figli del Lavoro (League of the Sons of Labor) “was a Milanese association of manual workers, which had among its objectives, in addition to the assistance of members and mutual aid, the popular education, the protection of the rights of wage earners and their social emancipation. In 1886, its banner should have been inaugurated: an important occasion, to be celebrated also with a song that, by exalting work, accentuated the ideals and aspirations of the labor movement”. The first public execution of the Inno I gave laboratori It took place on March 27, 1886, in a restricted ceremony in the hall of the Workers' Consulate, one day ahead of schedule, as the great celebration on March 28 had been prohibited by government authorities.
Its lyrics were written by Filippo Turati – a young lawyer who, later, was among the founders of the Socialist Party of Italian Workers (1892) –, while the melody was written by journalist and musicologist Amintore Galli, who gave it a strong rhythm, like a marching band. Although banned by law, Inno I gave laboratori It was a great success and spread quickly throughout the country, with its “lyrics loaded with a strong ideal tension, that tension that in Italy at the end of the 19th century accompanied, constantly and with great force, the first steps of the workers’ movement”.
The origin of the expression, however, is a little more remote, as explained in the dictionary Treccani. Attributed to Karl Marx, in Italian it would have been used for the first time by Giuseppe Garibaldi in a letter dated August 5, 1873 and addressed to friends of the Pink Gazzettino, Milanese newspaper with a socialist tendency: “l'Associazione internazionale dei Lavoratori è il Sole dell'avvenire” (The International Workers' Association is the Sun of the future). Historian Alberto De Bernardi claims that Garibaldi used it in 1872, when justifying, in a letter to his friend Celso Ceretti, his membership in the First International.[2]
Even with the decline of communism, after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the expression continued to be used, as some examples attest. In 1999, historians Maurizio Antonioli and Pier Carlo Masini, in Il sol dell'avvenire: l'anarchism in Italy from the origins of the first world war (1871-1918), rescued the role of anarchists in the political and social history of the young nation.
In 2008, television director Gianfranco Pannone, when dealing with the emergence of Red Brigades (Red Brigades) and his links with former left-wing fighters and communist dissidents, he titled his documentary The sun of the future (Red dawn). The DVD, released in 2009, was accompanied by a libretto written by journalist Giovanni Fasanella and the director himself. The documentary was based on the book Che sleep in BR (2004), authored by Fasanella and Alberto Franceschini, one of the founders of the clandestine organization.
In 2013, Bolognese writer Valerio Evangelisti published Live working or die fighting, first volume of the trilogy The sun of the futureFollowed by Chi ha del ferro ha del pan (2014) and Notte ci dano le stelle (2016). In it, by focusing on the lives of some families of rural workers in his native region, Emilia-Romagna, he outlined an overview of the events that shook Italian society in the period that followed the unification of the country – marked by the affirmation of the labor movement, cooperatives and socialist ideals, which encouraged general strikes – until the beginning of the 1950s.
In 2014, Massimo Biagioni, in Dove sorge il Sol dell'Avvenire: 1964. Il viaggio Pontasseve-Mosca in the diary of a group of young people in Pontasseve, reported the trip to the Soviet Union of seven young people from this small town on the outskirts of Florence, highlighting their curiosity, their hope, but also their disappointment when faced with the reality of Eastern Europe, which contrasted with the information circulating in their country.
In 2017, Franco Bertolucci launched The Orient emerges from the sun of the world: its Italian anarchy and Russian revolution, presenting the results of his research on Italian anarchists' criticisms of the Russian Revolution, whose authoritarian regression they had immediately noticed and denounced before other leftist movements, being considered traitors to Soviet ideology.
In 2021, in Splende il sol dell'avvenire: the birth of the PSI and the PCdI in Novi Ligure, Lorenzo Robbiano recalled the industrialization of the small Piedmontese town from the end of the 19th century and the consequent conflict between capital and workers, who were acquiring class consciousness.
Always in 2021, a poster commemorating the XNUMXth anniversary of the Communist Party of Italy (named at the time of its founding) printed the following phrase: “Sorgerà di nuovo il sol dell'avvenire” (The sun of the future will arise again).
Finally, in 2023, Nanni Moretti, resuming his eternal diatribe against the PCI, released the feature film The sun of the future (The sun of the future, in Portugal; The best is yet to come, in Brazil, a title that indicates historical ignorance and can lead to an inaccurate interpretation of the film).[3]
It was not the first time that the director focused on the crisis of the left, as it had been present in his filmography since his debut, The defeat (1973, short film in Super-8), to the work on screen in this text, through the feature film palombella rossa (1989) and The thing (The thing, 1990, documentary), without forgetting some jabs he made in other films, for example, in April (April, 1998), when watching an electoral debate dominated by Silvio Berlusconi on television, the protagonist begs one of the debaters, Massimo D'Alema, to say something left-wing, or even something that is not left-wing, but to react.
La defeat [The Defeat], for which the young director was also a screenwriter and interpreter (Luciano, a former activist from 1968 in crisis), was made for the political organization Nuova Sinistra; To talk about him, there is nothing better than turning to Moretti himself, in a text reproduced by Wikipedia: “History is articulated on two planes. On the one hand, the invasion of Rome by metalworkers (one hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, half a million...), on February 9, 1973. The arrival at the station, the capture of the city, the students' march, the final rally in Piazza San Giovanni. The soundtrack follows and comments on the demonstration, following the parallel development of the protagonist's crisis. On the other hand, sketched more as notes than as history, the life of a militant from a left-wing group.
After a series of experiences, doubts and disappointments, friends and companions who were too confident, he stopped doing politics. The moments of this crisis, which alternate with a combative working class that the protagonist never encounters, but which he supports, perhaps only ritually. The film does not have an ending, but remains a proposal and stimulus to critically confront some problems present today on the left, such as the public-private relationship and the 'new way of doing politics'”.
The 1989 feature film was released on September 15th and, as the director himself mentions, in a statement reported by Wikiquote: “when it premiered palombella rossa, a young PCI critic (not a smug old man) wrote that mine was an old film and that it wasn't about the PCI of the time, Occhetto's PCI, which certainly didn't have an identity crisis. Yes, two months later the Berlin Wall fell and the PCI no longer existed.” Historical events will prove Moretti right, but his account is postponed until the approach of The thing.
By portraying a communist leader disoriented due to the end of the ideals for which his generation had fought, palombella rossa it carried within itself the omens of the sunset of a political period. After crashing her car, Michele Apicella loses her memory and her amnesia becomes a metaphor for her party's loss of identity. Memory, however, will gradually rebuild itself, in flashes of the past, in which images of The defeat. Despite having no memory, he leaves with his team, Monteverde, to play a water polo game against Acireale: the dispute pool acquires a very political meaning, especially when Michele makes a parabolic shot, which could mean the victory of his team, instead of throwing the ball to the right, throws it to the left.
According to Mattia Madonia, the 8-9 sporting defeat would correspond to the “defeat of [19]89”. As at the end of Doctor Zhivago (Doctor Zhivago, 1965), by David Lean, which the sportsman and the public watch on the television in the club's bar, you cannot change the course of history, no matter how much you hope this happens. Thus, the film within the film becomes the metaphor for Michele's “failure” in sport and politics, although he does not seem willing to renounce his activism.[4]
In fact, in a television interview, he stands in favor of a change of direction: “We have to look at man. We have to open the doors of the party to everyone, to young people, to women, to workers, to movements… We have to say come, come to the party, take control of it, let’s see together what we can do…”.[5] The criticism that the water polo player makes of his party is the same that the dissident Corrado Corghi, former secretary and former member of the National Council of Christian Democracy, pronounced in 2008 in relation to the PCI of the late 1960s, in the now cited documentary The sun of the future: “I saw, from then on, what was happening, I'm not saying the fragmentation of the Communist Party, it would be ridiculous to think about that, but I saw a differentiation, within it, between a more open young world, more open also to dialogue, and the way , let’s say, static, truly static” of the communist federation of Régio da Emília.
On the way back to Rome, Michele's car plummets down a steep slope, but he and his daughter emerge unharmed and go to meet people who came to help them. Everyone turns to the top of the bank, where, as if it were a poster, a large reddish disc is being erected and salutes it with their right arm projected forward. While the adult Michele, along with the others, pays homage to the sun of the future, the child Michele mocks the situation, highlighting the character's split.
Before dealing with The thing, it is essential to recapitulate the context in which it emerged. On November 12, 1989, during a ceremony commemorating the Italian Resistance in Bologna, Achille Occhetto, secretary of the PCI, proposed “not to continue along old paths, but to invent new ones to unify progressive forces”, words that led to predicting a change radical in the party. It was what was called “la svolta della Bolognina” (the turning point of Bolognina), due to the region of the city in which the announcement was made.
The discussions that followed ended up creating two wings within the PCI: the right-wing, loyal to the secretary, envisaged a coalition with other left-wing parties, the so-called “diffuse sinister” (fuzzy left); the left, at first, opted for prudence. The change of route would also imply a new name for the party; but, as Occhetto said, “first comes the thing and then the name.
And the thing is the construction of a new political force in Italy.” Thus, the debate about “la svolta della Bolognina” also came to be known as “il dibattito sulla Cosa” (the debate about the Thing). On January 31, 1991, the last congress of the Italian Communist Party was held in Rimini (Emilia-Romagna). On February 3rd, the Sinister democratic party (Left Democratic Party) and, on December 15, the party Communist refoundation (Communist Refoundation).
Interested in the debates that followed the “svolta della Bolognina”, not in the Central Committee, but in some sections of the PCI throughout Italy, in The thing, Nanni Moretti gave the floor to ordinary activists, who discussed the changes proposed by the party, including the name itself, and expressed their concern about the future of the left. Moretti recorded the discussions with an almost anthropological look, without any comments on his part and presented them, in the documentary, in the following order: December 19, 1989 – Francavilla di Sicilia (near Messina); December 10 – Genoa, Ca' Nuova neighborhood; December 7th – Bologna, Navile neighborhood (formerly Bolognina); December 3 – Naples, San Giovanni a Teduccio neighborhood; December 19 – Turin, FIAT Mirafiori; November 27th – Milan, Lambrate neighborhood; November 24th – San Casciano in Val Pesa (near Florence); November 22nd – Rome, Testaccio neighborhood.
The spontaneity with which the director knew how to capture heated popular debates, without intervening in the ongoing process, was a positive point highlighted by left-wing critics, as recorded by Wikipedia. In il poster (left-wing Roman daily, founded by communist dissidents), Rossana Rossanda wrote that The thing it was “a lesson in journalism”, for having managed to capture “a moment that will not be repeated, in its infancy, caught by surprise, in shock, uncertain” and for “having looked at the body of the experiment and not at the doctors who operated.
Not for the secretary, the leaders, the maître à penser, but for specific men and women that the press does not frequent, but vaguely evokes as a mass of resistance, people whose consensus only counts, serialized, in view of the balances at the top. […] in politics, thoughts are measured in power. Moretti took care of something else, the rest, the lives, faces and hands of those who are the base, a party without names”.
The spirit that stirred The thing is also present in the feature film from 2023. Only this time, unlike the three previous films, Moretti focuses on an event from the past to reflect on the present: the Hungarian Revolution (October 23 – November 10, 1956 ), when Soviet tanks crushed a popular uprising that, from a peaceful demonstration of solidarity with the victims of repression (workers and students) to the Polish strikes in June of that same year, turned into an uprising against the local dictatorship and the presence of Russians in the country[6]. Its repercussion was intense and in Italy it led to challenges to the official position of the PCI, with activists who publicly took a stance against and dissociated themselves from the party.
The director, therefore, is not interested in the “official” version, since he is interested in bringing to light how that moment was experienced by simple people, who had adhered to communist ideals because they believed in equality between men and social justice. . In the first images of the film, Rome is asleep in the shadow of the great dome of Saint Peter's, which dominates it. In the silence of the night, near Castel Sant'Angelo, a group of men descend with ropes down the wall along the Tiber River, to spray paint in red: The sun of the future. [7]
This will be the title of the work you will watch, which begins by focusing on the peripheral neighborhood of Quarticciolo, where section leader Antonio Gramsci arranged for electric lighting to be installed in popular houses and on the street. The people applaud the arrival of light, to the satisfaction of Ennio Mastrogiovanni (Silvio Orlando), who is also the editor-in-chief of Unity, the official body of the PCI, and his companion Vera Novelli (Barbora Bobuľová), a seamstress and activist.
This is when the first transition from the past (the film being shot) to the present takes place: behind the scenes of its production, Giovanni is explaining to the youngest members of his team what communism was like in Italy at the time. Concerned about the prop man, who always leaves objects on the film set from after the period portrayed, Giovanni also does not strictly obey the rule, as he wants the fictitious label “Rosa Luxemburg” for a bottle of mineral water, in honor of the great thinker and communist activist. Polish; he orders an abbreviation of a headline Unity from 1956, too long for today; and, above all, he does not want Stalin to be represented in his film: if the Hungarians had torn down his statues in real life, he excludes him in fiction, tearing up the effigy of the unwanted leader on a poster that portrayed him alongside Lenin. His anachronistic gesture is ironic, if one considers that Stalin, by manipulating images, ordered his disaffections to be erased from photographic records.
Giovanni's idiosyncrasies weren't just these: he hates clogs and teases whoever wears them (like Barbora, who, in fact, is mules), except for Aretha Franklin in her musical number, ThinkOn The Blues Brothers (The Dick Face Brothers, 1980), by John Landis; although she would rather wear a pair of flip-flops than clogs. Remember the elegance of Anthony Hopkins' character in The father (My father, 2020), by Florian Zeller, who walked around the house in pajamas but wearing shoes. An implication already present in Mass is over (The mass is over, 1985) e palombella rossa, and which returns in Il sol dell' avenire: “I hate the clogs, and you know this… If the foot is covered in the front, it must also be covered in the back. I don't see the fingers? And then I don't even want to see the heel! […] You clogs They are like slippers, which are not shoes, but a worldview. A tragic worldview.”
There are, however, also sympathies, like the patchwork quilt that covers him – the same as Michele Apicella from Sweet dreams (Golden dreams, 1981) –, which together with Bronte's ginger cream ice cream with cinnamon, hazelnut meringue and pistachio, enjoyed watching the musical comedy for the umpteenth time Lola (Lola, the forbidden flower, 1961), by Jacques Demy, in the company of family members, would guarantee the success of the new production. But the daughter receives a call from her boyfriend and his wife from the production of another director's film in which she is involved. Left to himself, Giovanni gives up seeing Lola and, without forgetting the ice cream, he goes to bed with the certainty that his latest venture will not be successful.
Leaving aside momentarily idiosyncrasies, sympathies, references and self-references[8] of the protagonist and returning to the film within the film, Cirkusz Budavari has just arrived from Hungary, to strengthen ties between his country and Italy, being well received by Ennio, Vera and the residents of the peripheral neighborhood. The name of the circus is Moretti's tribute to the Hungarian Imre Budavari, former water polo player, Michele's opponent in palombella rossa.
Although the presence of the circus has almost always been associated with the Fellinian universe, according to Demetrio Scelta, perhaps Cirkusz Budavari brings to mind “also the lightness of circus performers in works such as The sky over Berlin […], ideal metaphor of a world suspended between the grace of desire and the gravity of the choices we are all called to make”.[9] The approach to the production of Wim Wenders (Wings of desire, 1987) is very interesting because it refers both to the words of French producer Pierre Cambou – who considers Giovanni's film “revolutionary”, “a metaphor for today's cinema, suspended high like a circus trapeze” – and to the original poster , in which an acrobat is suspended on a swing attached to a kind of balloon that bears the title of the film, probably the one that appears in a quick flash night.
The circus' debut show is received enthusiastically by the public, with even the leader of the PCI, Palmiro Togliatti, deputy Nilde Iotti (his companion) and other members of the central committee present, who, however, suddenly leave the place. As soon as that night's session ends, Vera, Ennio and members of the team go looking for the only television set in the neighborhood and, appalled, watch the events in Hungary (repertoire images from the time). Vera is shocked by the fact that the invaders are communists like them, but Ennio says they should wait for the party's position.
Meanwhile, the filmmaker and his French producer roam the night in Rome looking for locations that remind them of Budapest in the 1950s. They are in Mazzini Square, already the scene of Dear Diary (Dear diary, 1993), to whom he dedicated the short film Square Mazzini (2017), in which, during a physiotherapy session, he talks about the public place, remembering that, when launched, ecce drum (ecce drum, 1978) was considered “a film too much about Rome, too much about the north of Rome, too much about the Prati neighborhood, too much about Mazzini Square”. Giovanni and Pierre get around on electric scooters, which remind us of the wasp from the first episode of Dear Diary. In the poster for the 1993 film, the protagonist is seen from the back on his means of transportation, which inspired the French poster for the 2023 production, with Giovanni seen from the front on his scooter, heading towards a radiant future (See a radieux avenue, title in French), which does not correspond well with the director's intentions.
Then, cars at full speed and exchanges of gunfire leave Giovanni perplexed. He is on the set of another film produced by Paola and questions his wife, who replies that it is a Shakespearean theme. The perplexity arises from the fact that in the works of William Shakespeare or Fyodor Dostoevsky there is no violence for violence's sake, as their representation always has a moral background. Later, in the car, another constant setting in Moretti's filmography, the filmmaker comments to an assistant that he would like to tell the fifty years of a couple's common life, with lots of beautiful Italian music. After so many years, he feels like he is still where he started and to recharge himself, he listens to the song Sono solo parole (2012), by Fabrizio Moro.
The music continues on set, where Giovanni heads the group that sings. The words, which had told so much in other films – like, for example, in Dogfish red: “It is necessary to find the right words: words are important!” –, now they are no longer enough, they are just words. A statement from its interpreter, Noemi, reported by Wikipedia, seems to summarize why Moretti inserted the song in the film: “It is a text about incommunicability, about the importance of gestures beyond words, about the fact of being able to solve problems and follow always forward in life.” When Giovanni shouts “Motor!” (Action!) and everyone present begins to move towards the camera, the sensation is of being on another layer of Moretti's production, which is not that of the characters in the two films, but that of the real life that is being filmed, it is a position taking.
When swimming, in a moment that should be a moment of relaxation, Giovanni is accompanied by his assistants at the poolside who, trying to adapt to the rhythm of his strokes, discuss details of the itinerary with him. During sports practice, he remembers that he would like to make a film based on the story the swimmer (The swimmer, 1964), by John Cheever, in which, on a beautiful summer day, a man decides to swim past all his neighbors' swimming pools[10]. The assistants immediately think of which Roman pools the protagonist could swim in, but Giovanni doesn't like their suggestions, because it wasn't taken into consideration that for him it would be a journey not in space, but in time. And swimming pool and time travel refer to Dogfish red.
The manifest interest in the cinematographic transposition of Cheever's story draws attention because, except on two occasions, Moretti did not base his work on literary works. It was the case of Three floors (Three Piani, 2019), taken from the novel Shalosh komot (2015), by Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, and, at the very beginning of his career, by How do you eat parli frate? (1974, medium-length film in Super-8), parody of an excerpt from the sixth chapter of the historical novel I promise sposi (The bride and groom, 1840-1842), by Alessandro Manzoni, in which the young filmmaker played the despotic Dom Rodrigo, willing to prevent the nuptials between the two protagonists, Renzo and Lucia.
Literary references, however, are present in his cinematography and it was no different with The sun of the future, as was and will be seen throughout this text. Furthermore, there would be a certain Pirandellian bias in the film, according to some critics, who either do not deepen his statement or are not convincing in his argument, as in the case of Alice Figini, for whom, like the playwright, the director “tears apart the linearity of the order temporal, disintegrates the scenic-theatrical space and breaks the fourth wall”.
As the practice is already established in cinema, it was not necessary to appeal to good old Luigi Pirandello, since, in the next sentence, the author kills the charade: “The reference to 81/2 by Fellini (1963) and its protagonist, director Guido Anselmi, whose Giovanni, played by Moretti, seems like his mirror double” [11]. In other words, the structure of 2023 refers rather to the Fellinian universe, although the two filmmakers approach the artistic and existential crisis of their alter egos in different ways.[12]
Returning to the film's plot, one night, at their daughter's request, Giovanni and Paola go to dinner at her boyfriend's house: they are surprised when they enter the Polish embassy and even more so by the fact that the ambassador, a gentleman older than their daughter, father, be Emma's love. The ambassador is interested in the film, which reminds him of his family's history in that same period in focus and praises the soundtrack that his girlfriend is composing, which Giovanni still doesn't know.
In the fiction within the fiction, Cirkusz Budavari is on strike, in solidarity with his compatriots resisting the Soviet invasion. Perhaps no Magyar circus visited Italy in 1956, but there is news of Honvéd visiting Milan for a friendly game against Milan, on December 8th, when their footballers entered the field carrying carnations, which they later offered to the public present, as a sign of friendship. The mythical Hungarian army football team had been touring Western Europe since November 1st and the players, faced with the invasion of the Red Army, instead of returning to Hungary, strove to remove their families from the country, as recorded in “Trip to utopia.”
Returning to the film that Giovanni is directing, in light of the strike announcement, Vera gives a speech on behalf of the PCI, promising help to the troupe and stating: “We Italians are a heresy in relation to the other communist parties”. Barbora's improvisations irritate the director, but she defends herself by declaring that she follows John Cassavetes' method. Giovanni counters that, despite his admiration, he is at the opposite extreme from the American director. Later, in the car with Paola, he complains about her rebelliousness and her sabotages, thinking about replacing her. This is where the reference to Think, which the two sing with great enthusiasm, in a moment of joy that precedes a long sequence in which Giovanni's grumpiness explodes.
No set of the other film that Paola is producing, they will start shooting the ending. Two actors confront each other: one kneeling and one standing, pointing a revolver at the other's head, in a shot that seems almost literally taken from Rent dogs (Reservoir dogs, 1992), by Quentin Tarantino,[13] in which one of the antagonists is standing and the other is lying on the ground, pointing weapons at each other. The filming is interrupted by Giovanni, citing an ethical problem: the proposed image is banal and outdated, and he does not conceive of cinema like that. It will be opposed to the reflection on senseless evil proposed by Krzysztof Kieślowski in the movie Nie zabijaj (Thou shalt not kill, 1988), expansion of the fifth episode of the same name of the television series Decalogue (The decalogue.
It is in this sequence that Moretti fits in a series of small sketches – which, according to Luca Pacilio and Eduardo Kaneco, refer to Annie Hall (Neurotic groom, nervous bride, 1997), by Woody Allen –, whose objective is to reflect on the gratuitousness of evil in cinema: the video call by architect Renzo Piano, who admires violence transfigured into language, as in Apocalypse Now (Apocalypse Now, 1979), by Francis Ford Coppola; the participation on the set of journalist and TV presenter Corrado Augias, who, as if he were an expert, explains that “the art is and has to be counterintuitive” (in other words, it should surprise, be the opposite of what is intuitively expected of her), and by the writer Chiara Valerio, author of Mathematics is politics (Mathematics is politics, 2020), which provides a brief overview of the geometry of a crime; the frustrated phone call to Martin Scorsese. Giovanni's stubbornness will continue into the night and it will only be in the morning that he will leave the set, which will allow the other director to finally finish the shots of his film, with which, he had previously said, he intended to bury neorealism once and for all (apparently, with a delay of decades).
Meanwhile, on the set of Giovanni's film, Ennio recriminates Vera, explaining to her that Hungary is a story in which it is necessary to side with communism. In response, the comrade kisses him, which irritates the director, because this was not foreseen. Barbora disputes his observation, as it seems to him that what they are filming is not a political work, but a pessimistic film about love. While everyone is getting ready to leave, Giovanni makes little moves with the ball, as in Sweet dreams e Mass is over. That’s when romantic music breaks out – And if you did not exist (1975) – great success for singer Joe Dassin, which introduces the sequence in which the filmmaker receives a visit from his daughter with whom he talks about the end of his marriage. In fact, Paola, who has been undergoing therapy sessions for some time, moved house because she can no longer accept certain attitudes from her husband, who cannot accept the separation, as he feels lost without his partner.
About the final sequence of Dolce vita (The sweet life, 1960), by Federico Fellini, the voice of Luigi Tenco rises in Far far (1966), singing about a love that has ended, now very distant, but of which traces still remain. On the beach, Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), because of the noise of the sea, does not understand what the young Paola (Valeria Ciangottini) is trying to communicate to him and makes a sign of resignation, with both hands cupped close to her face, as if I wanted to say it could have been another way, but it was like this, patience.
The Fellinian sequence coupled with Tenco's song creates a highly poetic moment, but it also leads one to reflect on the possibility of redeeming one's own mistakes (those of the dissolute Marcello if he heard the call of the angelic Paola), of rebuilding one's own life, of how everything It could be different, if... Giovanni, who was watching the film, encourages two young people sitting in front of him to kiss, as if they were him and his wife when they were young. And when Paola asks him if he remembers, he responds: “I remember” and it will be this same phrase that he will repeat twice when he wakes up on the sofa in the house of the daughter who is hosting him, which allows him to interpret this sequence as if it were a dive into the personal past, but in a dreamlike way.
In the writing of Unity, Ennio had surprised two comrades who were kissing. He calls one of them to his office and reproaches him for his lack of modesty, adding that a communist must always have exemplary behavior (forgetting that Togliatti had left his wife for congresswoman Nilde Iotti). Upon hearing a noise on the set, Giovanni discovers that Pierre slept there, claiming that his hotel has been very noisy for the past week. Trying to persuade the director, he tells him about his contact with Netflix, which would guarantee the success of the production (especially after the producer's arrest) and which triggers one of the film's most sarcastic sequences.
The meeting with Netflix representatives is painful because Giovanni and Paola's arguments clash with the stereotypical formulations with which they are countered. A political film can also be poetic, as San Michele had a cock (A cry of revolt, 1972), by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani), recalls the director, and the actors are good, adds the producer, but they retort that Italian cinema has no star system and Giovanni's film is missing one what the fuck, which leaves both husband and wife astonished as the robotic stance of their interlocutors as they always hit the same chord: Netflix is present in 190 countries.
Forced to suspend filming and separated from Paola, Giovanni delves into his personal past and, when stopping at a traffic light, in the car next to him, he sees the two young people at the cinema, who are fighting and to whom he suggests what to say, how to behave, giving advice. the boy going after the girl. On the image, appears The song of lost love, by Fabrizio De André, recalling an overwhelming youthful passion that cooled and from which only “indifferent caresses and a little tenderness” remained. It is an apparently “loose” sequence from the film in which he is the protagonist and which refers, once again, to the dream dimension.
At home, he receives a visit from Silvio and Barbora, who are worried about him and about the difficulties in resuming filming, and they continue to meet. When Giovanni returns to the room, after answering a phone call, he finds the two of them cooing and, forgetting that he is not in front of Ennio and Vera, but Silvio and Barbora, he reprimands them, as if he no longer distinguishes between fiction and reality.
Meanwhile, the film crew begins to disperse, the circus is dismantled. And, in the other film, Vera and a handful of comrades, who intended to publish a document in favor of the Hungarian revolution in the party organ, are astonished by Ennio's refusal, a fact that refers to a real episode, that of the “Manifesto of the 101 ”, written on October 28-29, whose signatories were against the official PCI line regarding the Soviet invasion. Unity refuses to publicize the text, causing the dissociation of activists; On October 30th, the manifesto is published by the bourgeois press, thanks to the efforts of literary critic Carlo Muscetta, as mentioned in “Journey to utopia”.
And, on set, Giovanni picks on Ennio and Vera's conversations when she is going to give him back his PCI membership card. He asks them to redo the scene without the dialogue and when he shouts “Action”, it takes place not in 1956, but in the present day, with him and the entire team dancing to the sound of Voglio Vederti Danzare (1982), by Franco Battiato: as the lyrics refer to dervishes that whirl to achieve mystical ecstasy – “And everything revolves around the room while dancing” – many critics pointed out the similarity between the two choreographies, although the dancers Morettianos just twirl, without following any ritual.
Dance is a constant in the director's filmography: just think of the couples who dance in church, to the sound of You will return (1965), by singer and composer Bruno Lauzi, in the final sequence of Mass is over; in that kind of water ballet in the swimming pool palombella rossa, packed by I am on fire (1984), by American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen; in the Arabic dance between actor Barry Huggins (John Turturro) and the costume designer (Isabella Merafino), encouraged by everyone present on the set, in My mother; in the very funny sequence of the second episode of Dear Diary, when, to the rhythm of the baião The black drone (1951), by Armando Trovajoli and Franco Giordano, Moretti tries to imitate Silvana Mangano, protagonist of the movie Anna (1951), by Alberto Lattuada, which a bar's television is broadcasting; in his admiration for an open-air dance, to the sound of Visa for a dream, by the Caribbean artist Juan Luis Guerra (1989), performed by Gruppo Diapason, which he joins, in the first episode of that same production and – why not? – in the zigzag movements on his motorbike that open the film, before the sound of the beats of Baton (1991), by Beninese singer-songwriter Angelique Kidjo, later supported by the voice of Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen in I am your man (1988), when he confesses: “Actually, my dream has always been to know how to dance well. Flashdance, that film was called that definitely changed my life. It was a film just about dancing. Knowing how to dance, however, in the end, I always limit myself to looking, which is also beautiful, but it’s not the same thing.”[14]
These examples serve to show that, in Moretti's films, if “there is a dance” or “a wave movement”, the song also imposes itself “because of its rhythmic meaning”, in the words of Federico De Feo. Always according to this author, however, the song has a much more interesting function: it “tells us in such detail about the characters, the main turning points in the plot, the deep subtext behind a sequence”. In this sense, the musical structure in the director's cinematography, “does not develop following the rhythm of the narration, but, […] on the contrary, focuses on the interior aspects of the protagonists, and […], through the choice of certain songs, allows public access to new meanings within their particular aesthetics”. This is what happens with all the songs mentioned so far and, in the case of The sun of the future, particularly with And if you don't exist,, Far far e The song of lost love, and many others: I'm not with you anymore (1968), by Vito Pallavicini and Paolo Conte, in the voice of Caterina Caselli, in Bianca (Bianca, 1984), which Moretti uses again in The stanza del figlio (Son's room, 2001), alongside By this river (1977), by English singer-songwriter Brian Eno; You are beautiful (1975) by Claudio Daiano and Gian Pietro Felisatti, in the voice of Loredana Bertè, in Mass is over; I'm a lucky guy (1992), by singer and composer Jovanotti, in April; The blower's daughter (2001), by Irish singer-songwriter Damien Rice, in The caiman (Or crocodile, 2008) and so on.
Returning to Voglio Vederti Danzare, the parallel with the dance of the dervishes, is not a hypothesis to be discarded, although this sequence lends itself to a more political interpretation. From the end of January 2002, in large Italian cities (Milan, Rome, Florence, Naples, Genoa, Bologna), several groups of citizens organized themselves in defense of democratic principles and legality. The movement came to be called gyrotondism because its participants gave a symbolic hug – making a roundabout (a wheel) – to the buildings of public institutions threatened by the center-right government of Silvio Berlusconi.
Although mostly leftist, the girotondini, who never had electoral intentions, did not fail to attack left-wing parties that they saw as numb and cornered. In this short-lived movement – its peak was in September, but a year after its emergence it began to cool down and, over time, lost more and more strength – the figure of Nanni Moretti stood out, who, during a rally of the center-left parties in Piazza Navona, in Rome (22 February 2002), accused them of not providing adequate opposition to the Berlusconian government proposals: “this evening was also useless […]. The problem for the center-left is that, to win, it will take two, three or four generations. […] with these types of leaders we will never win” – a kind of anathema that still hangs over Italian politics today.
As mentioned above, Giovanni and the team begin to twirl around and in the middle of the sequence, images of the young people in the cinema, now parents of two children, are interspersed, sitting on the grass and wearing hippo clothes, which refers to the meeting between Michele (Moretti) and Cristina (Cristina Manni) on a lawn in ecce drum, when she, when asked what she lives, says the famous phrase: “I go for a walk, I see people, I go there, I get to know them, I do things”. It is in this milder climate that Giovanni is about to shoot the last shots of his film, after, thanks to Paola's commitment, Korean producers became interested because they were convinced that, as Scelta recalls, it is “a film that describes 'the death, the end of everything', an obscure, dark work, in which, somehow, violence, although not explicit, advances underground until it leads history to a completely hopeless conclusion”.
Ennio, torn between his ideals and the official party line in relation to Hungary, will hang himself and for Silvio this is the great moment of his role. First, however, there is the rehearsal and Giovanni takes the actor's place. With the noose around his neck, as if he were symbolically reenacting his own suicide, he remembers what Italo Calvino said on the occasion of another writer's suicide: “Cesare Pavese killed himself so that we could learn to live”, suggesting looking at this extreme gesture from another perspective : “Pavese’s death, in reality, was a declaration of life, an unsatisfied, uncompensated hunger for life”, according to Figini.
And how to learn to live? Give up on the dismal scripted solution and go for another ending, because art – in this case, cinema – does not need to reproduce reality, but can reinvent it, transforming itself into a political act. And Moretti's political engagement, in Pacilio's words, “passes through a reflection at the center of which the person's intimacy is placed, perhaps because it is from the fragility and changes in mood of each personality that nuances emerge, those that slogans lack or to the false certainties of politics practiced today”.
Once the decision is announced, everyone in the team wants to give their opinion and, over the lively meeting, a voice-over is raised, which suggests “What if…”, as it does not accept the current voice: “History is not made with the ' if'. Who said it? I, on the contrary, want to do it straight away with the 'ifs'”. Because, suggests Scelta, the objective of a counterfactual story is to be “an opportunity to rethink the future, not to resign ourselves to defeat or the end of everything. And this choice, deeply poetic and intrinsically political, makes The sun of the future a big, big film.” Salvatore Cannavò follows this same line of reasoning: “Restoring reason to the Budapest insurgents, correcting the mistakes of Togliatti, whose heritage negatively conditioned the left even after the dissolution of the PCI, is not just playing 'make believe', but it is a method to recover seeds and launch them to build freedom and emancipation, ideas of collective participation, a little grain thrown to recover the imagination. It is also a method for uncovering the expressive potential of a film which, thanks to a whatafuck unexpected can be emotional.”[15]
And so, all the members of the event, led by Ennio, head to the PCI central directory, in Via delle Botteghe Oscure, in the heart of Rome. Hiding behind a window, Togliatti and advisors observe the movement and listen to the forceful request for the party to change its position. That's what happens and, soon after, Unity prints a new headline: “Soviet Union, goodbye!” It's a kind of dive from reality into fiction and from the present into the past, because Giovanni, Paola and other members of the production also witness what happened, which shuffles the temporality between the film itself and the film within the film. History is not made with “ifs”, but art is, not to change history, but to encourage people to reflect on it. In the television program “Metropolis Extra”, Corrado Augias, regarding this work, which he considers “beautiful”, stated: “Moretti found the only way to be able to face the great bankruptcy of the communist party, guilty of not having collected, in 1956, Hungary's opportunity to break away from the Soviet Union and become a major European social democratic party.”
The shuffle continues in the final sequence of the film, with the entire Morettian “family” parading along Via dei Fori Imperiali, with the Colosseum in the background. Inaugurated by Benito Mussolini on February 28, 1932, in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, the then Via dell'Impero It changed its name in 1945, after the end of the Second World War, and, from 1950 onwards, it became the stage for parades on June 2nd, Italian Republic Day.
Nothing more symbolic, therefore, than parading, in a place so dear to the fascist ideology that once again hovered over the country, the red flags of the PCI, the effigy of Leon Trotsky that towers over the members of Giovanni's film, that of Moretti and other previous films by the filmmaker, to the sound of a marching band. The spectator knows that he is in the present, because all the actors are there, not as personas, but as people,[16] with the exception of one or the other: on top of an elephant, are the two communist activists Silvio and Barbora, or even Ennio and Vera, who, free from the director, can finally give vent to emotional reciprocity? The actors characterized as Palmiro Togliatti and Silvio Berlusconi (Elio De Capitani, The caiman) are, however, their characters or themselves? As Victor Russo states, in Moretti's cinematography, there is “a difficult line to delimit how far reality goes and at what moment fiction begins, as a way not only of reinforcing a more inflexible vision in his way of thinking about the world and the cinema, but mainly opening up the range of interpretative possibilities”.
In fact, in this new shuffling of the film's various layers, the same sensation of leaving the fictional dimension and entering reality, experienced when listening to the choir on the set sing Sono solo parole, a song that highlighted the urgency of transforming one's ideas into action to escape the state of apathy suggested by the opening verses – “Having the impression of always remaining at the starting point / and closing the door to leave the world outside the room” – which Giovanni had screamed in the car before arriving at the studio. So, how to get out of the eternal starting point? How not to leave reality outside? Rewinding the tape, as they said at the end of the last century. Rewind it to 1956, as the film within the film does; rewind it to 1886, as the marching band seems to highlight – which refers to the music with a strong rhythm of the Inno I gave laboratori –, by following the procession of the Morettian “family”, which, in turn, would evoke, from a figurative point of view, The fourth state (1899-1901), by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, according to some critics, such as Giuseppe Rinaldi.[17] In other words, starting again, with the same ideals in defense of the exploited and oppressed that were being left behind as the left closed in on their dogmas, on their orthodoxies.
In the film's final sequence, Moretti reconciles with all his creatures, inviting them to parade with him, as does Guido Anselmi, the film director's alter ego. 81/2, had done in the final round, when the entire Fellinian “circus” is present. In the last shot of the 2023 production, with his smiling gaze and waving at the camera, Moretti, however, goes further, because the invitation ends up extending to spectators who share his ideas. The parade becomes a call to take to the streets, made, more than by the filmmaker, by the citizen Nanni Moretti, the same person who, in 2002, had embraced the cause of the girotondini. Therefore, as Figini says, The sun of the future “it is not a film about the past […], but about our uncertain, directionless present”. Therefore, it was not a question of falsifying historical events or retelling them, but of taking history back into our own hands, leaving aside the errors and idiosyncrasies of the past. It is an act of resistance. And, by reactivating the original spirit of communism, it is a proposal for a fresh start. Let the emphasis given to the figure of Trotsky, which must have caused followers of orthodox communism, aversion to Togliatti, say so; the “cancellation” of Stalin, to which Giovanni is blatantly hostile; the card with a red background, which closes the film, whose words have a fabulistic tone (“And they lived happily ever after”) full of irony: “Since that day, the Italian Communist Party freed itself from Soviet hegemony, carrying out in Italy the communist utopia of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which still makes us so happy today.”
According to Escorel, this “fictitious celebration followed by a fanciful subtitle”, which closes the work, is legitimate: “After all, it is just a fiction film, and Moretti does nothing more than exercise his right to freedom to invent” . His is not an isolated opinion, but, just as there are appreciators, there are also detractors – both on the left and on the right – of this latest work by the Italian director. For Mario Sergio Conti, “The best is yet to come is a film by and for old people”, and the final procession is nothing more than “a beautiful fantasy. And uncritical. And escapist.” In turn, João Pereira Coutinho, who read the uchronic moments staged on screen literally, considers the filmmaker to be the greatest left-wing melancholic he knows: “Nanni Moretti's alternative history can alleviate your left-wing melancholy. But when I watched the film's resolution, I couldn't help but think that Moretti, ironically, just replicates the old Stalinist technique of rewriting the past according to the convenience of the present.” In short: the two authors put The sun of the future under the sign of an achronic left-wing nostalgia, which is not found in the folds of this and the director's other achievements, always willing to criticize and openly support his opinions. In other words, like his alter ego Giovanni, picking on everything he doesn't like, harassing others.
By proposing a version of history that is not the one corresponding to the real facts, Moretti is resorting to utopia, and a well-typified one, contrary to what Guilherme Colombara Rossatto states, for whom “utopia is not characterized” in the final words of the film (which, in his text, do not correspond exactly to what is read on the screen), adding: “It is up to each of us to imagine the best possible future, in accordance with our values and expectations”, without taking into account that social changes are collective events .
When Maurizio G. De Bonis asserts: “The political aspect linked to Italian communism, and the application of communism in general, evokes an unconventional nostalgic conception. Moretti, in fact, does not seem to be nostalgic for the times of yore, that is, for something that has already passed. His is a longing for something that never happened and that represents a void in the minds of those who, thanks to Marxism, had dreamed of a better world. […] this is a simultaneously aesthetic and ethical vision, which manifests itself through a poetic principle” – he is talking about utopia, “a time of not yet"[18], therefore, of something to be carried forward,[19] something that, according to Moretti's proposal to his spectators, can still be achieved,[20] as long as, free from the constraints of the past, one can follow new paths.
*Mariarosaria Fabris is a retired professor at the Department of Modern Letters at FFLCH-USP. Author, among other texts, of “Contemporary Italian Cinema”, that integrates the volume Contemporary world cinema (Papyrus).
References
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Notes
[1] The lyrics, written by Felice Cascione, were sung to the tune of Katyusha, Soviet popular song by Matvey Blanter and Mikhail Isakovsky. Sung for the first time at Christmas 1943, the song supporter spread in the first days of the following year.
[2] According to De Bernardi, the “metaphor expressed all the expectations of change that the struggle for social emancipation brought with it”, thus, “the rising sun became the key element, together with the hammer and sickle, of many symbols of socialist and communist parties”. “The 'Sun of the future', in fact, brought within itself a hope and a utopia: the hope was that a 'new world' of equality, justice and freedom could be realized through the incessant confrontation with the class enemy – the bourgeoisie capitalist; the utopia, almost religious, was that the 'sun' (the new world) was situated in an indistinct 'future'”, lending itself to “multiple interpretations, visions of the future and theoretical conceptions that would traverse the history of the labor movement throughout the XNUMXth century and would be harbingers of deep lacerations and bloody ruptures”.
[3] Regarding the translation of the title Among Us, writes Inácio Araujo: “The Sun of Tomorrow, from the original name of the film, is a proposal of resistance, whether we agree or not. His Brazilian version, 'The best is yet to come', seems like a mistake – Moretti's idea is that we are experiencing a profound political, aesthetic and moral crisis, and that the best is probably behind us”. The clarification is valid, but the conclusion is not, because, if the original title points to the act of resisting, it is because, in some way, future changes are still expected.
[4] Although he refers specifically to Michele Apicella, protagonist of five of Moretti's works of the first hour, capable of reconciling “an intimate awareness of his own time” with “an equally intimate belonging to the past”, Pietro Masciullo's comment could be applied practically all of the filmmaker's films. According to the author, they “managed to give life (in Truffaut's way) to a transversal character who transcends the stories and the screen, who suffers and smiles, who sings and loves, who feels passions and suffers defeats, but who always has the courage to face one’s present with an open mind.” Apicella appeared in I sleep like an autarchic (I am a self-sufficient, 1976) and was also the protagonist of Ecce hype, Sweet dreams, Bianca e palombella rossa, each time having a different profile and occupation, while François Truffaut followed the fictional life of Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Leáud) from childhood to adulthood.
[5] Continuing his philippic, the interviewee starts to sing the second verse of And I come to look for you (1988), changing its meaning, because the search for God in Franco Battiato's song turns into the search for an ideological doctrine: “This popular feeling / is born from divine mechanisms / a mystical and sensual rapture / binds me to you / It should change the object of my desires / not be satisfied with small daily joys / act like a hermit / who renounces himself.” The compositions of Battiato, one of Moretti's favorite singers, had already served as musical background for sequences of Bianca (Scale by Grado, 1982) e Mass is over (I trained in Tozeur, 1985); Voglio vederti danzare, 1982) will be part of the soundtrackand Il sol dell'avvenire, as will be seen below.
[6] In the opinion of Alice Figini, “the war in Hungary, told on black and white television screens, actually reflects our contemporary times, the war that is taking place today in the heart of Europe”. Eduardo Escorel also refers to Ukraine, and also adds the Gaza Strip, highlighting how The sun of the future “gains unexpected relevance”. In turn, Leonardo Sanchez states that “the film, in its own way, also touched on the point of Russian aggression against its neighbors”, before giving the floor to the filmmaker himself: “We wrote the film before the invasion of Ukraine, but at the same time Looking at the historical material we used, seeing the Soviet tanks entering Budapest, I was very impressed to realize that this story is very contemporary.” Despite transcribing Moretti's statement, the writer exchanged Imre Nagy's Hungary for Todor Zhivkov's Bulgaria, a few lines above.
[7] Guilherme Preger, when referring to these first images, writes: “The latest film by Italian director Nanni Moretti opens with an unusual scene: men climb down scaffolding to write the words in ink on a large wall that looks like a prison. which later turns out to be the title of the film: The best is yet to come. Later we will know that this passage is actually called a sceneWhat a fuck', by directors of the Netflix streaming channel. Every movie sponsored by this video-on-demand channel needs to have a “what’s that?” scene. in its initial moments to capture the spectators' attention ('the first ten minutes are crucial'). Nanni Moretti challenged the producers to put the scene in the first two minutes, which they thought was too early.” It is not clear what the author sees as unusual in this opening of the film and why he links it to the meeting with Netflix representatives, since the turning point will occur in the final sequences.
[8] Due to the constant recourse to self-reference, Morettian achievements “almost always have many points in common. However, each of them is unique within its peculiarities”, in Juliana Figueira’s opinion. This cools the temptation to see The sun of the future as a summary of the director's cinematography, which, in an excerpt from an interview reproduced by The State of S. Paul, warned of this possibility: “This is a very personal film for me and some will see in it a kind of 'summary' of my themes and styles. I’m not fully aware of what they are anymore, but I am aware that this is how the film will be dissected.”
[9] As Scelta himself points out, in My mother (My mother, 2015), Moretti showed the queue at the Capranichetta cinema in Rome to watch Wenders' film.
[10] the swimmer had already been brought to the screen in 1968 by Frank Perry, under the same title (in Brazil, Riddle of a lifetime), with Burt Lancaster as the main performer.
[11] Although most criticism points to a connection between The sun of the future e 81/2, the Portuguese website Culture prefer to associate it with The voice of the moon: “Because of the artistic/existential identity crisis, the fantasy it involves and the circus aspect, the temptation to classify The sun of the future like the 'Eight and a half by Nanni Moretti' is very big. However, having identified Fellini's ghost, perhaps the reference of this universe that is most felt in this abundant filmic self-reflection is The voice of the moon (nineteen ninety). Simply for this reason: in this final work, the Italian master expressed, through the contrasting figure of the lunatic Roberto Benigni, all his sadness in relation to a world that had lost its poetry, surrendered to appearances, stupidity and the dominated small screen. by Berlusconi…” – which seems a bit forced, as Moretti’s alter egos may be eccentric, but they are not lunatics.
[12] It is interesting that, in this production, the filmmaker filmed in the Cinecittà studios, so dear to Federico Fellini, a rare fact in his career, with the exception of Sweet dreams e habemus papam (habemus papam, 2011), as Ilaria Ravarino remembers.
[13] According to some critics, despite repudiating Tarantino's violence, Moretti was inspired by Inglorious bastards (inglorious bastards, 2009) and in Once upon a time in Hollywood(Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, 2019), for the uchronic turn at the end of his film. But the issue of ukrony in The sun of the future is placed on another level.
[14] According to De Feo, in Moretti, “there seems to be a perennially latent desire to create a true musical”, as announced in Dear Diary and tested in April. In this one, we see some scenes from a musical about a Trotskyist confectioner, who, in Rome in the 1950s, is against Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union, which is why he lives isolated and is only happy when dancing, surrounded by his friends. sweets and together with your kitchen helpers. A cart forward, which starts from the choreography until it approaches Moretti and his team shooting the film and dancing, breaks the idea of illusion and the film ends with the filmmaker on the left and the camera that is filming on the right. In the words of Marco Grifò: “If it is true that the final image frames the two protagonists of the film, who fought each other throughout April (Moretti and cinema), finally together, dancing, so the unreal musical about the Trotskyist confectioner […] has […] real consequences on “making” and “creating” cinema, on producing images that seek to satisfy their author and that, effectively, contains something of their world”. Perhaps this also derives the idea about the cherished musical with so many beautiful Italian songs, in The sun of the future, which tells a love story that has lasted half a century, perhaps between the director and cinema.
[15] The filmmaker himself referred to the film as such in the aforementioned interview published in The State of S. Paul: “Although the world around him is more difficult to accept, Giovanni does not want to lose to a disappointing reality. And most of all, he doesn't want to give up on his dream of changing it. If life and history do not allow it, cinema, through its contagious strength and energy, transforms reality and makes dreams possible.”
[16] Alongside Nanni Moretti and the other members of The sun of the future parading: Fabio Traversa (How do you eat parli frate?, I sleep like an autarchic, Ecce hype, palombella rossa); Dario Cantarelli (I sleep like an autarchic, Ecce hype, Bianca, palombella rossa, habemus papam); Lina Sastri (Ecce hype); Gigio Morra (Sweet dreams); Mariella Valentini, Alfonso Santagata and Claudio Morganti (palombella rossa); Renato Carpentieri (Dear Diary); Silvia Nono (Dear Diary e April); Jasmine Trinca (The stanza del figlio e The caiman); Anna Bonaiuto (The caiman e Three floors); Giulia Lazzarini (My mother); Alba Rohrwacher (Three floors).
[17] The indication is interesting, but the author is mistaken about the name of the painting, calling it Third estate, and writes with one “l” and not two [Pelizza x Pellizza] the painter’s first surname.
[18] Reading in light of the article by Edson Luiz André de Sousa. According to the psychoanalyst, when resuming, in contemporary times, the discussion about Utopia (1516), by the English humanist Thomas Morus (“the function of imagination and the ethics of desire”) –, also including the essays by the French philosopher, poet and chemist Gaston Bachelard collected in The right to dream (The right to dream, written between 1942 and 1962) – the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, in The principle of hope (the hope principle, 1954), “proposes thinking about utopia as establishing a space and time of the not yet”, therefore, an “active wait”. That "not yet establishes a possible horizon that depends on our movements to build it.”
[19] “Bloch speaks of the utopian in the sense of going beyond what is presented to us as the natural course of events”, notes Maria de Fátima Tardin Costa, before transcribing the author's quote: “Man is someone who still has a long way to go. In and through his work, he is constantly reshaped. He is constantly ahead, coming up against limits that are no longer limits; becoming aware of them, he surpasses them.”
[20] In the conclusion of his text, Costa notes that the utopian function cannot be “considered as a mere chimerical fantasy, since it is not moved by an empty possibility of an abstract dream, as it is associated with the 'real possible'”.
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