Three levels of real life, three complex human events, three stories of intimate and private pain and suffering. This, in summary, is the plot of Tre Piani, the latest film by Nanni Moretti, based on a novel by Eshkol Nevo, in theaters for a few days and distributed by 01 Distribution (RaiCinema). Made in 2019 and distribution suspended due to Covid, it was in competition for the recent one Cannes Festival where it does not seem to have received a very favorable reception.
Everything takes place within the same three-story building in a middle-class district of Rome. The protagonists are judges (the same Nanni Moretti and his wife Margherita Buy), architects (an improbable and well-worn Scamarcio), a vague and uncertain one Alba Rohrwacher in the company of Adriano Giannini, husband on the scene.
The destinies of the three levels of the story, of the three apartments, fatally intersect on the path of evil, of malaise, trivial and ordinary which, however paradoxical it may appear, is closer to our existence than it often appears. Each of the three dwellings hides a past and a present where there is no hope. Everything takes place under the dark and threatening hood of accidents, errors, oversights, repressed or badly expressed impulses. Here then is that a fortuitous and unfortunate road accident reveals a sagainst father/son without solution, as well as an innocent walk by an elderly neighbor called to babysit a young neighbor triggers a violent and brutal spiral and finally, the loneliness of a young mother left alone by a distant husband and with a mother now close to mental decline leads her to a disappear without why and unanswered. All feelings treated with a rasp and a plane, without any nuance and without any shortcut, as in the purest and most consolidated "Moretti style".
The director claims to have "freely adapted" to the novel but it appears quite clear that he has put the "trademark" that has marked his cinematographic works for many years now, all hinged on intimacy, even exasperated personalism, from the reflection on the pain and the suffering however always all concentrated on small and limited groups that revolve around the family.
The story of Tre Piani can also hold up, the narration is understandable and the events narrated are plausible. The accounts don't add up when Moretti goes in search of symbolisms and references to the “social” with which they would like to anchor themselves to the present, to the public, to the contemporary world that surrounds the building. It doesn't hold the black crow of the Rohrwacher which forces the viewer to wonder in vain what it refers to; the scene of the assault by right-wing extremists against the center where immigrants are welcomed does not hold up, and it does not hold up to Fellini's comparison with the scene of the tango dance on the street. appears all too forced how much didactic.
The camera itself with its eye appears too uncertain and stiff in worn-out and not very incisive images. Big screen audiences are now more than ever weaned and raised on a new cinematic language and more accurate while Moretti seems to have remained in the golden age of successes that made him a great director of the past. There is no doubt, in fact, that the author of Ecce Bombo, Caro diario, Bianca and so on fully belongs to the history of Italian cinema as one of the best readers and narrators of the country in the last 40 years. But cinema, storytelling through images, requires something more not only in terms of descriptive imagination but also in terms of the ability to direct, to choose texts and characters in a more modern and appropriate way than what viewers require afterwards comparison with decades of fiction film and television of a much higher quality.
At the end of the vision of Tre Piani we remembered when, some time ago, Nanni Moretti said in Piazza Navona at a meeting of the Olive tree the famous phrase “…with these executives we will never win”. Paraphrasing and trying to understand why at Cannes the film did not have the reception that the director expected that "Italian cinematography will never win with these films!" However, for lovers of the subject, who are not few and certainly not naive, the film deserves the cost of the ticket more than an evening at home on the armchair is worth: cinema in the big hall is always something else.
