Within the rather specialised field of films about making films, there's an even more arcane sub-set of films about not making films. We get to see all the stages of the process - the scripting, the shooting, the hiring and firing - but somehow the promised masterwork never ends up in the can. Fellini's 81/2 is the classic example, and Godard, Wenders and Abel Ferrara have all had their shots at the mini-genre most calculated to alienate a lay audience. The films that do get made in the real world - as opposed to the films-within-the-films that don't - come across as a sigh of relief mixed with despair, exuding a sense of amazement that, against the odds, they've somehow made it on to the screen in one piece.
The most recent addition to the canon is Aprile, by the Italian comic director Nanni Moretti, and it's something of a special case - it's about not making two films. Aprile comically chronicles the agonies of film-making - the noble intentions, the fevered effort, the research, the last-minute U-turns. It concludes that sometimes you have to forget the creative angst and just go with life. That way you may act-ually get the film made, if only in the form of a little fantasy sequence in your head, which Aprile's light-as-air closing sequence may well be.
Moretti's films are always partly about the difficulty of being Nanni Moretti, partly about the difficulty of being Moretti in contemporary Italy. He started out in the 1970s playing his alter ego Michele, a disillusioned young left-wing idealist, but increasingly he has appeared as himself, a disillusioned middle-aged idealist who happens to be a leading film-maker. His last feature, Dear Diary, dealt with his solitary Vespa rides around Rome in summer and his experience of life-endangering illness. This time, in equally diaristic mode, he's torn between the demands of personal life, political life and the need to make a film close to his heart. Should he do what duty seems to demand and make a documentary on contemporary Italian politics, or follow his fancy with a 1950s musical about a Trotskyist pastry chef? And can he actually concentrate on either project while his partner, Silvia Nono, is about to give birth to their son?
Stretching over four years, Aprile is a brilliant cut-and-paste job, mixing Moretti's documentary footage, acted comic scenes from his life and miscellaneous sampled TV footage. The film begins in 1994 with Moretti watching TV in despair as the right-wing media mogul Silvio Berlusconi is elected prime minister. A smarmy commentator pays elaborate homage to Berlusconi's courage, and reports the emotions that the great man has personally confided to him. We quickly realise, of course, that he's talking about his own boss.
Moretti has directly addressed Italian politics before, notably in Palombella Rossa (1989), a lament for the downfall of the Communist Party, enacted as a game of water polo. He's clearly less at ease with straight reportage. He films an anti-fascist demo, but it rains, so all he gets is a sea of umbrellas. He goes to interview a left-wing politician, only to find him packing his bags and leaving Rome for good. He decides to sound out the nation through its media. In a brilliant gag, he delivers a mystifying Dadaist litany, which turns out to be a long list of newspapers and magazines. He patches his collected clippings into a vast carpet of newsprint, and then disappears under it. It's a wonderfully acute image - at once concise and ironically laborious - of the questionable idea that you can read the soul of a nation through the disposable daily ephemera of its zeitgeist.
Moretti fares no better with his musical - he turns up on the first day of shooting, skulks around a bit, then sends everyone home. The main distraction in his life, keeping him from both projects, is the birth of his son. In theory, fatherhood will integrate this troubled solipsist more wholly into the world, but only via his own self-absorbed preoccupations. He crows about becoming a true adult at last, but immediately starts quizzing his mother on his own infancy. In Italy, the film has been much criticised for sidelining Silvia Nono, but her and little Pietro's absence from the film is a true reflection of the congratulatory self-absorption that often accompanies new fatherhood. Moretti is surely only being true to his screen persona - and besides, wouldn't it have been more of an imposition to demand that Nono live with the camera on her when she had more pressing things to worry about?
The dizzy, farcical musical number that ends Aprile could possibly be interpreted as a shrug of defeat in the face of the world's awfulness, an incitement to forgo reality and dance. But it comes across as more of a gesture of defiance in the face of disaster, a gesture as telling as the one that ended Dear Diary's chronicle of illness. There Moretti simply celebrated the joys of survival by knocking back a glass of cold water. Aprile's finale - in which even the stiff, cycle- helmeted director sways along with the tune - is a dash of uplifting folly, but political nonetheless. His musical is about a Trotskyist hero after all, which is one bit of light entertainment guaranteed never to get an airing on a Berlusconi channel.
"Aprile" (15) runs at selected cinemas nationwide
