WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Cannes Film Festival: The Cayman by Nanni Moretti and Lights in the Dusk by Aki Kaurismäki


(Transcript)
Originally broadcast May 25, 2006

	Milos Stehlik

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Nanni Moretti has often been called the Italian Woody Allen, not because they have much similarity in their sense of humor, but because both Allen and Moretti are willing to explore their own neuroses on the screen. One of the permanent neuroses of Moretti’s recent life, something which has consumed him for years and is in some ways responsible for his not having made a film since his award-winning The Son's Room in 2001, is the man who led Italy until recently: former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. In the five years since he made The Son's Room, Moretti has been busy organizing and working in the Berlusconi opposition.

He devoted much of his energy to getting rid of Berlusconi, whom he considered the worst thing to happen to Italy. Shortly after his new film, The Cayman, was released in Italy, he finally succeeded when Berlusconi narrowly lost the election.

But The Cayman is a potent riff not only on Berlusconi, but on the arrogance and concentration of power, the power of media images and the manipulation of the public. The main character of The Cayman is Bruno Bonomo, a grade Z movie producer whose filmography includes such classics as Mocassin Assassins and Maciste Versus Freud. Now Bonomo’s career has hit the skids. He finds it impossible to find money for his latest project, The Return of Christopher Columbus. His wife wants a separation and then a divorce. The bank is on his case, trying to get repayment of the loans he has outstanding. Clearly, Bruno is going under.

Then, by chance, he gets the script of The Cayman by a young woman director. But this is a theme far from Bruno’s exploitation ventures. It is a contemporary film about Berlusconi. The woman director is inexperienced, and the production almost comes to a halt. Bonomo only has money left to film one day of Berlusconi. It is the day of judgment–the end of the trial of Berlusconi for corruption. In this fantasy sequence, Moretti himself plays Berlusconi, and delivers many of his now-famous orations about how he, elected by the majority of the Italian people to govern, he was above and outside the law and its reach.

In Moretti’s fantasy, Berlusconi is convicted. But the film ends with the judges walking out of the courtroom, being pelted by Berlusconi supporters.

Humor at the other extreme of comedy defines the newest film by Aki Kaurismaki, Lights in the Dusk. Kaurismaki says that the film is the third part of his trilogy which started with Drifting Clouds, which was about unemployment. This was followed by The Man Without a Past, which was about homelessness. The theme of Lights in the Dusk is loneliness. This is deadpan comedy on the edge. The main character, Koistinen, works as a security guard. He is passive, made the subject of ridicule and practical jokes by the other guards, and excluded from their after hours camaraderie. He lives alone. He meets a blonde woman whose boyfriend sets him up for a jewelry store robbery by having her drug him and stealing his keys. Although he knows how he was set up Koistinen remains steadfastly mum. He is convicted and spends a year in jail. When he gets out of jail and finds a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant, he meets the blonde and her boyfriend by chance in the restaurant where he works. From pure mendacity, the boyfriend tells the maitre d Koistinen served time for robbery and Koistinen loses his job.

While the plot does not exactly inspire a comic framework, Kaurismaki is a master of sketching the lives of people on the fringes of society. In Lights in the Dusk, Koistinen doesn’t have much going for him in life except his essential goodness. And there IS humor. When Koistinen gets out of jail, the girl who works at a sausage stand asks him, “How was it?” Koistinen answers: “All the doors were locked.”

Lights in the Dusk will be criticized as being thinner in substance than other Kaurismaki features like Man Without a Past. But it still reflects the remarkable talent with which Kaurismaki reduces humanism to its essence—pure goodness, pure evil, loneliness, and in the final shot of the film, the possibility of redemption.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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