FILMS/
THE CAIMAN
Il caimano
World Cinema
Italy/France, 2006, 112 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Sat, Apr 28 / 06:45 / Kabuki / CAIM28K
Mon, Apr 30 / 09:30 / Kabuki / CAIM30K
Wed, May 2 / 04:15 / Kabuki / CAIM02K
Sun, May 6 / 09:15 / Aquarius / CAIM06A
CREDITS
- dir
-
Nanni Moretti
- prod
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Angelo Barbagallo, Nanni Moretti
- scr
-
Nanni Moretti, Francesco Piccolo, Federica Pontremoli
- cam
-
Arnaldo Catinari
- editor
-
Esmeralda Calabria
- mus
-
Franco Piersanti
- cast
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Silvio Orlando, Margherita Buy, Jasmine Trinca, Nanni Moretti
- source
-
Wild Bunch, 99 Rue de la Verrerie, 75004 Paris, France FAX: +33-1-53-01-50-49 EMAIL: edevos@wildbunch.eu
With his first feature since The Son’s Room (2001), Nanni Moretti returns to the acerbic political satire that was his trademark in the ’80s and ’90s. Released on the eve of Italy’s national elections in 2006, this story of a washed-up Z-grade film producer affectionately mocks the Italian film industry, bourgeois family values and Italian machismo while viciously and wittily attacking Berlusconi’s political machinations over the past two decades. Producer Bruno Bonomo’s career and personal life are in crisis, and he decides to take on an idealistic young director who wants to make her first feature about Berlusconi’s nefarious influence on Italian political and public life. Structured as many films within a film, The Caiman deftly shifts between scenes from Bonomo’s past productions (with titles like Lady Cop in Stilettos and Maciste Versus Freud), imagined and actual scenes from the in-progress Berlusconi biopic and Bonomo’s troubled domestic life with his young sons and soon-to-be-ex-wife. Over the course of his ill-fated but persistent production, three different actors play Berlusconi, including, briefly, Moretti himself. Each of the performances brilliantly foregrounds certain aspects of the former prime minister’s public persona, while clips from Berlusconi’s own most damning performances—such as his publicly recorded insults of other European leaders—are thrown into the mix. Ultimately an examination not of a single political figure but of a nation in the midst of an ethical identity crisis, Moretti’s film provides hope for a newly invigorated and aesthetically adventurous political cinema.
—Irina Leimbacher
Sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute and Pomodoro. Presented in association with the Italian Cultural Institute.