European Films

Part divorce drama, part political satire and part film-within-a-film, Nanni Moretti’s Il Caimano (The Caiman) tries to wear as many hats as a film as its subject of satire Silvio Berlusconi tries to handle in politics. Both end up with results that induce laughter as well as the more than occasional groan. In Italy, the tale of the divorce of a down-on-his-luck producer who is working on a political pamphlet of a young director took in millions at the box office and went home with the David di Donatello for the year’s Best Film. Perhaps the fictive demise and imprisonment of populist right-wing leader Berlusconi is enough for a substantial part of the (left-leaning?) Italian masses, but other Europeans might want something more for their ticket- or rental fee, such as a properly structured and coherent story.

Moretti’s approach to his own political satire at first seems opaque: his story follows Bruno Bonomo (Silvio Orlando), a cantankerous film producer who is about to divorce from his wife (Margherita Buy, from Manuale d’amore/Handbook of Love) and whose company is in dire need of a hit to avoid bankruptcy. He hits upon the daring screenplay of a film called Il Caimano, which is a not particularly veiled attack on Berlusconi, though Bruno would not know since he has barely read past the first page. It is from the hand of a short film director (Jasmine Trinca, also from Manuale d’amore/Handbook of Love) with strong political convictions who wants to direct her first feature. Bruno, lacking better ideas or alternatives, hires her on the spot.

Moretti’s idea is admirable enough: take the story of Bruno’s divorce and contrast it with Italy’s divorce from sound government since Berlusconi – aided by his riches of unknown provenance – entered the political arena. The problem is that the vehicle that connects the two divorces, the Caimano that Bruno is producing, is uneven at best, leaving many possible parallels by the wayside, which results in a mix of a pedestrian divorce story and a dreary account of the production woes of a political satire without any real bite.

In Pedro Almodóvar’s Hable con ella (Talk to Her) and La mala educación (Bad Education) the smaller film-within-the-films were an essential part of the main narrative, providing both contrast and subliminal information in a fascinating dialogue with the main narrative. Fellow Cannes-nominee Moretti is unable to work the same magic in Il caimano, where the main and film stories are not only robbed of many of their thematic similarities, but where a strange unevenness of tone (from satire to drama to apocalyptical nightmare) ruins much of the divorce story’s goodwill and finally even robs the divorcees of their own proper ending, as the terrifying and contradictory vision of an Italy on the brink of collapse as Berlusconi is escorted to prison takes over the film and leaves everyone else out in the cold: the young director, the producer, his ex-wife and the audience.

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