This note comes to you directly from the Latin American Film Festival of Dallas offices. As I finalize next year’s selection, I was also wrapping up the final touches on the translation of Jean-Claude Guiguet’s text, The Gift of Tears, a text that I’ve carried with me for a long time. It speaks with an absolute clarity regarding the importance of emotion in cinema and it’s something that I deeply respond to (I remember many years ago I wanted to write a long piece on Frank Borzage called “Take a Chance on Emotion”). Guiguet speaks in terms of melodrama and music and the importance of staging, yes, but his piece evokes, above all, the search for an emotion. The search for those films which break down our defenses and leave us with our tears – they are hard to come by. I brought up this Guiguet formula myself earlier this year when I defended Takahisa Zeze’s Fragments of the Last Will (would Guiguet classify it as a mélo?). When choosing texts to translate, we always follow our intuition, our interests, no obligations. If we chose this Guiguet for any major reason, it’s because we wanted to acknowledge its beauty, we wanted to claim it as ours. I wonder how many LAFFD films in the end will get close to this desire…
To switch gears entirely, let’s talk about Nanni Moretti’s Aprile, a film that seems impossible for anyone else to make. Moretti’s films in the 90’s are, as he himself makes clear, film diaries. Moretti abandons the character of Michele Apicella to film things in the first person. It’s a very interesting proposition to film in this way. Moretti films the world around him directly, using real names, filming the politics of his day. I am somewhat ambivalent about the Rosenbaum idea of films in the 90’s being something akin to a “global newspaper,” but a film like Aprile is something close to that. Or maybe closer to an opinion column. Either way, it is impossible to separate the personality of Moretti as it reacts to events around him (creative frustrations, the birth of his son, “say something left-wing!”) without the texture of everyday life in Rome between 1994 to 1997. It is not a film that I could imagine being made in the United States (least of all because there’s not very many directors who act in their own films and whose on-screen personas are part of their affect), but also because the major directors of our days hide from the contemporary and use the cloak of history to make their critiques. But this strategy also robs us of something important, which is to examine the world as it is today, how we move in it, how we think through it. Last year, Moretti returned to a similar mode in A Brighter Tomorow. Once again he played a filmmaker hoping to make a historical film, once again he barged in on a film shoot, once again his neurosis fill the screen – the difference is that in Caro Diario he could make the film critic cry when talking about their review of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but in this latest film he can stop a film shoot in its tracks to discuss the ethics of film violence but nobody will care and will just wait until he goes away to get the shot. There’s less beauty in this new film, it’s a much more pessimist gaze, but what’s important is that he looks at the present head-on, dealing with Netflix, dealing with old age, dealing with political regret. When Moretti tries to film a historical subject, it is always against the struggles of today, mixing the past with the present, rewriting it as it could be, what it should have been. The difference in approach is the weight of thirty years gone by. Aprile, in turn, is a representation of a consciousness swimming inside the contemporary, worried for the world his son is being born in, examining it closely, neurotically, and then wishing to film musicals about Trotskyite pastry chefs in the 1950’s! I can understand the impulse entirely, but he only gives us those images after showing us the beautiful shots of the protest rally in the rain, where we can only make out the umbrellas. It’s very far away from Guiguet’s melodrama, but I was moved just the same.
Lucky Star 