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Bianca (1984) Nanni Moretti - Movie Club
Topic Started: Jul 4 2018, 12:17 AM (264 Views)
javierquintero
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock. - Walter Benjamin
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Bianca (1984) Nanni Moretti

A math teacher moves to a new place because he just got a new job at a school.
However there is always a chance for romance and mystery.


Michele Apicella
Within Moretti's ouvre there is some context worthy to be shared if you would eventually like to explore the rest of his early filmography. Michele Apicella is a character played by Moretti himself throughout the first seven features with some significant variations.

Here is the excerpt of "Caro Diario and the Cinematic Body of Nanni Moretti", an article by scholar Millicent Marcus (available on jstor.org) precisely referring to Apicella's character.

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I would like to know what you think about the film. Hopefully by the end of it you will be interested in watching more from Moretti.



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Lencho of the Apes
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My contract with the movie and the characters was destroyed by that scene at the beach where Michele picks out a woman at random and goes and lies down on top of her; after that, it started seeming like an exercise in seeing how far Moretti could go in undercutting the "lovable everyman" that Italian comic actors all seem to embrace by making his everyman more and more unlikable. After an hour or so, I was cringing every time the character entered a new scene.

There's a lot to unpack, though, and this single facet of the movie isn't anything more than a point from which to start a discussion.
Edited by Lencho of the Apes, Jul 6 2018, 05:38 PM.
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mesnalty
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If indeed all of Moretti's early films feature this Michele character, I'll have to watch a couple more if I want to really grok this one, I guess. I liked some of the absurdist touches, like the giant tub of Nutella or whatever it is that he has in one scene. But I had the same reaction as Lencho to that beach scene.

I think, too, that the film might have worked better as a commentary on people like Michele if the world around him wasn't also so consistently bizarre. I'm not sure it meshes so well with the portrait of the celebrity-addled school, though if Moretti had made a different film just focusing on that angle I'd probably enjoy it.
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javierquintero
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock. - Walter Benjamin
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Lencho I disagree with this "contract" metaphor for reception. The moment I demand conditioned expectations from films in the same way I expect something specific from my personal assistant or from my toaster, then my experience becomes limited to only one kind of response formula or structure in function of an equally generic result (in this case it would be the supposed idea of a "'lovable everyman' that Italian comic actors all seem to embrace") that should be assimilated or rejected, in any case according to my conditions (that makes it a "contract").
Secondly, this idea of what they "seem to embrace" is a generalization that should be more developed to be fair with the Italian comic actors. Do all of them actually seem to embrace such figure?

Now, a different thing would be to define or analize how the specific movie is made and its own logic and then trying to find out the elements that are inconsistent within the system and not in regards to preconceived ideas. Otherwise some fans of Monteiro's God's Comedy will end up coming to this thread to accuse Moretti of not achieving what Monteiro did in terms of sexual harrassment or stalking people or anything else.
Edited by javierquintero, Jul 7 2018, 12:13 PM.
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Lencho of the Apes
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Javier, I agree that it's a lazy form of reception that becomes progressively more useless, the further away you get from a cinema defined by inflexible narrative conventions or genre attributes... but it's the one I practice much of the time, and it seemed useful (enough) here, given the nature of this movie. I could certainly have expressed that idea differently, without reference to genre conventions, in a way that was more acceptable to you.

Comic actors "seeming to embrace" an identity: I would say it's true, in different ways, of Marcelo Mastroianni, Alberto Sordi, Roberto Benigni and Moretti here (until it isn't.) That's essentially every Italian comic actor I've ever seen (missing Toto and de Sica, a.o...) ; we can debate whether or not it's a large enough sample to be repesentative. If my perception were not that they do that, I would not have stated that they seem to do that, profe.

"Defin(ing) or analyz(ing) how the specific movie is made and its own logic and then trying to find out the elements that are inconsistent within the system and not in regards to preconceived ideas" is exactly what we're trying to do here; if you look again at my last paragraph, it may register on you that the comments I had posted were intended as nothing more than a place to begin from in the process of doing that, a way to get the ball rolling.

I'm always open to learning from other board members, but I don't welcome entering into interactions that are inscribed with power relationships like teacher/student. Maybe you could put down the ferrule?
"The four cardinal points of the compass? In reality, there are only three: North and South."
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javierquintero
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:scratch:
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Lencho of the Apes
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If Moretti's "Michele" movies are a metatext about 1968 and its aftermath, the only thing this one shows us is a society that's absorbed the disruption completely and reestablished the former hegemony unchanged -- there's the one scene where two characters identify the period immediately preceding Mai 1968 as the pinnacle of western civilization, and Michele's defining characteristic here is how exactly he embodies pre-feminist expectations about marriage, courtship and women's roles.

Or are there nuances I'm missing?

The idea of following a single character through successive iterations of the zeitgeist is a real interesting one; I'd like to see lots of filmmakers tackle that project. Unfortunately, the ones who have done it -- Truffaut, Lindsay Anderson -- didn't do anything interesting with it. Can't judge Moretti on the basis of one film; maybe that series of every-seven-years documentaries is a productive take on that concept, I haven't seen them.
"The four cardinal points of the compass? In reality, there are only three: North and South."
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