The Caiman

Nanni Moretti's film about a producer and about Italian politics at once. Bruno used to make cheap genre films and can no longer find work. His marriage is ending and his debts are growing. A script arrives from a young director; the subject is Silvio Berlusconi. Bruno takes the project on without reading it, then realises what he has taken, and nobody wants to finance it. The narrative runs on two levels: Bruno's disintegrating life, and attempts at the film that cannot be made. On the second level are scenes in which different actors play Berlusconi, and those scenes carry the actual political comment. What was most argued about is the timing. It opened just before the Italian general election of 2006 and was read as an intervention in it. Moretti appears in the film himself, coming on in the final section as the third person to play Berlusconi. Silvio Orlando plays Bruno and Margherita Buy his wife. One of the important films of its moment for anyone who likes Italian cinema and political satire. For a viewer distant from Italian politics some of the references stay unexplained and the film's hardness does not fully register.