The Italian auteur Nanni Moretti has directed his best film for years with this warm, witty and seductive drama. He has got his mojo back, and incidentally restored it to John Turturro as well, who plays a vain and insecure actor obsessed with telling everyone how he almost worked with Stanley Kubrick. Margherita Buy plays a film director whose personal crisis has brought her to the edge of mental breakdown involving vivid, hallucinatory dreams. Her mother, Ada (Guilia Lazzarini), is dying in hospital, but it is her brother Giovanni who must take time away from his off work to look after her, while Buy suppresses her guilt and carries on shooting her film.
Giovanni is played by Moretti himself, effecting what is surely a sibling swap from his own real-life experience. Margherita has hired conceited American star Barry Huggins (Turturro) to play a factory owner and there is a terrifically funny moment in which Huggins must drive a car in Margherita’s film and is unable to see where he is going: a brutal metaphor for movies and much else. Mia Madre is about the paramount importance of enjoying life and cultivating love; cinema and socially engaged art are valuable insofar as they promote these imperatives. There is a bit of Fellini’s 8½ and Truffaut’s Day For Night here, but it’s unmistakably a Moretti picture: sad, funny and very satisfying.
