Sweet Dreams

Nanni Moretti's film about a film director. Michele Apicella is working on a new film. The subject is Freud's mother. At the same time he appears on television discussion programmes, gives talks at the university, takes questions from audiences, and everyone expects an explanation from him. The method is to satirise that demand. Michele is asked the same thing constantly: why are his films not understood, why do they not address the public, why are they so turned in on themselves. His answers grow steadily more defensive. The narrative makes no distinction between the real and the imagined. His nightmares, the scenes of his film and his actual life run into one another, and the film does not explain it. Moretti mocks his own position: the intellectual director knows there is a distance between him and his audience, and he both defends that distance and is troubled by it. Moretti directs and plays Michele; the character recurs across several of his films. It won the Silver Lion at the Venice film festival in 1981. An interesting work for anyone who likes Italian cinema and films about cinema. For a viewer expecting a straight narrative, the film proceeds in fragments and some of its references belong specifically to the Italian culture of the period.