The Nanni state

Nanni Moretti, director, on the set of ‘We Have A Pope’

The popularity of Nanni Moretti’s gentle, charming films remains one of the cinematic world’s appealing mysteries. They shouldn’t work. They dodge uneasily between comedy and seriousness. They ramble when they should be pressing home their point. They are intensely personal, and rarely play to the crowd. In his breakthrough, 1993’s Dear Diary, he rode a Vespa through the summery streets of Rome, and railed whimsically on various pet hates and obsessions. Nothing could have been more self-indulgent, yet the film hummed with life and intelligence. It won Moretti the best director prize at Cannes, and was admired all over the world.

In his latest film, We Have A Pope, Moretti has turned his acute eye on the bizarre goings-on of the Vatican. The veteran French actor Michel Piccoli plays Melville, an elderly cardinal who is surprisingly elected Pope at the expense of the hot favourite for the post. The plume of smoke duly rises before the faithful, but Melville has a sudden panic attack. Is he up to the task? Does he really want to be Pope? Has God chosen wisely? He needs the urgent help of a psychotherapist: in comes the atheist and irreverent Moretti, ready to explore and help analyse what is surely the most tortured soul on the planet. The stakes are high as the two men search for resolution. And in the meantime, Catholics everywhere wait anxiously for the outcome.

The scenario is rich in satirical possibilities, at a time when the status of the Catholic church is not at its highest. As he was making the film, Moretti was suspected of aiming a cataclysmic broadside against an institution for which he has little evident sympathy (he is himself an atheist). Yet, not for the first time, the director confounded expectations. The film takes an improbable turn: during the impasse, Melville escapes the confines of the Vatican to wander around the streets of Rome, seeking inspiration to help make his decision. Moretti’s psychotherapist, prevented from leaving, organises the confused cardinals into a volleyball tournament to help pass the time. There is no Sopranos-like confrontation between analyst and patient, and the humour at the expense of the church is feather-light.

Moretti, a youthful 58, is in London to introduce his film at the London Film Festival, and I ask if he has felt any disappointment from those who expected him to make a more hard-hitting film. “Those who can see the real film, and who are close to my sensibility, have found it moving,” he replies. “Others wanted a different film but I wouldn’t have been able to write it. A film that centred on the relationship between the Pope and the psychotherapist would have been another film altogether.”

It’s not really about the Catholic church or religion, I say, but about self-doubt. He agrees. “We all feel inadequate at certain moments of our lives. And one of the reasons I didn’t want to play the part of the Pope is that I wanted him to be old. It makes the film stronger, and more profound. It is about a man who doesn’t have so long to live, and really feels that sense of being lost.”

Moretti also acts in the film, playing a psychotherapist

As always with Moretti’s films, the director uses a winning blend of pathos and sheer comedy to explore his themes. In a very funny opening sequence, we hear the thoughts of the cardinals during the election, each of whom hopes he won’t be victorious. Did Moretti think it was really like that? “The cardinals say ‘yes’. There is this sense of not feeling ready or worthy to take on such a task. I wanted to avoid the way these things are usually depicted on cinema or television, where they are all plotting, and canvassing votes. But we don’t really know what happens. It is one of the few mysteries left for journalists.”

The mix of comedy and drama that marks his work is, he says, something that has come naturally to him, ever since he started making super-eight films nearly 40 years ago. “I wanted to alternate between those tones, not because of some great cinematic project but because that is how life is, that is how our days are, our relations with other people and ourselves.” Another early decision was to act in his own films. “It helped make them more distinctive. And then I was free to make fun of myself rather than others. Most writers and directors, certainly in Italy, prefer to make fun of worlds that are socially different from theirs. But I make fun of my own social class, my own political views.”

It was an inspired decision. It is Moretti’s own performances, moving subtly between wry humour and soft melancholy, that give his films his personal stamp. If his early works tended towards comedy, prompting comparisons with Woody Allen, he stretched himself in the other direction in mid-career with a devastating portrayal of a grieving father in 2001’s The Son’s Room, a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes.

While Dear Diary focused in detail on his own personal experiences, The Son’s Room was a projection, dealing with every parent’s biggest fear, that of losing a child. He says it is the only film in which he was unable to shake off the day’s shooting. “I came home in the evening and was still full of pain. That had never happened to me, and hasn’t happened since.”

Moretti works on a slow schedule (“I make films when I have something to say”) and there was a five-year hiatus between The Son’s Room and 2006’s The Caiman, a film that satirised the political reign of Silvio Berlusconi. Once more expectations were high; once more they were confounded. The feeling around Italy while he was making the film was “hysterical”, he says. But the film was more nuanced than a straightforward political attack, focusing equally on the breakdown of a relationship and the perilous state of the Italian film industry. “There was a lot of discussion before the film came out by people who hadn’t seen it, and a lot of discussion after the film’s release, by people who still hadn’t seen it.”

Perhaps his subject was beyond satire: the most scathing quotes come from Berlusconi’s own mouth in gaffe-ridden footage from parliamentary debates. I ask if he feels any pressure, as a leading cultural figure on the political left, to tackle traditional foes such as Berlusconi and the church. “No,” he insists firmly. “Absolutely not.”

In truth, Moretti’s cinema has broader concerns. In all of his films, I say, there seems to be a hankering for a simpler way of life: the joyous games of volleyball in the Vatican courtyard in We Have A Pope, the paean to the life-affirming qualities of a daily glass of water that concludes Dear Diary. “Simplicity is an arrival point, not a departure, otherwise it becomes banality,” he distinguishes. “As a reader of books, I appreciate more and more the effects of simple writing. I get annoyed when I read writers who are in love with their own writing, who take too much pleasure in it.”

‘We Have A Pope’ opens in UK cinemas on December 2