So many thoughts and emotions watching Nanni Moretti’s 1994 ‘Caro Diario’ (Dear DIary):
1) Nanni Moretti is a clever guy,
2) and he has come a long way in 20 years,
3) but he is not “the American Woody Allen”.
4) ‘Caro Diario’ explains a lot about why nobody was going to see Italian movies in the ’90s,
5) and Italian movies are so much better now.
I took a fresh look at Nanni Moretti’s 20-year-old Caro Diaro because I found it on Amazon Instant Video and I thought, “Oh good! Another Italian movie to stream!” and then after I watched it again I thought, “Why is this on Amazon Instant Video?”
It’s not that it’s terrible. Nanni Moretti is, as I’ve said, clever, and there are some clever scenes in this oddly disjointed “diary”. When his friend, who brags that he hasn’t watched TV in years, gets hooked on the American soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful” and spots some (apparently real) American tourists he begs Nanni to go find out “if Sally Spectra’s husband knows that she’s pregnant”, since the episodes lag in Italy.
And when he daydreams about torturing a movie critic with his own rave review of Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer, that’s brilliant, and very Woody Allenesque.
And of course when, in the first part, Moretti is scootering around Rome, that’s fun. Rome is always fun to watch. It was tiresome watching him ask everyone if they were Jennifer Beals, and ridiculous when he actually finds her. Jennifer Beals explains to her companion that this guy is a little “off”, which is polite. And he seems to take it as some kind of compliment, which it is not. Particularly in this first part of a three-part movie, Nanni Moretti is just a little too precious.
Between the bits of cleverness in Caro Diaro I found myself why I or anyone else would be interested in the unnatural and pontificating dialogue, characters saying things nobody would say in real life. Better filmmakers find less direct and more subtle ways of making their point, but in the ’80s and ’90s in Italy too many filmmakers were making too many autobiographical, personal, and egocentric movies with limited appeal. This is where a movie making system like Hollywood’s works so much better, with all of its checks and balances. Nanni Moretti needed a producer or somebody to reign him back in.
But Nanni Moretti did get better, and movies like the award-winning 2001 La Stanza Del Figlio and the 2011 Habemus Papam proved that.I guess there are people that have a sentimental attachment to Nanni Moretti’s early work, but this fact escapes me. That Caro Diario is available on Amazon Instant and so many other good movies are not is a mystery to me, but here you have it:
WATCH CARO DIARIO ON AMAZON INSTANT
I Love Italian Everything 