Caro diario (1993)

An open diary in three chapters, and a Vespa is the only engine that drives it. Nanni Moretti plays himself, or a version of himself, riding through a deserted Roman August, then retreating to the Aeolian Islands, then submitting his itching body to a parade of specialists who cannot agree on anything. The structure is loose, the tone is dry, and the camera watches its own author with the patience of a man who has decided that his private irritations are a public matter. They are, mildly.

The film's politics are the politics of a grumpy pedestrian. Moretti scowls at the gentrification of his neighborhoods, at the banality of Italian cinema, at critics who overpraise a serial killer picture. On the islands, his friend Gerardo flees modern commodities and ends up enslaved to soap operas, a small joke about how consumer appetite wins every argument. The final chapter turns that suspicion outward: a year of expensive pills, dietary prohibitions, and alternative cures, all useless, until one doctor listens long enough to order an X-ray. The target is the commercialization of care, and the film strikes it without a slogan. The film does not, however, assemble a roster of contemporary concerns. Its cast is Italian, its gaze is male and autobiographical, and its women drift through the frame as friends and companions with no argument attached. Race, sexuality, body image, and mental health go unmentioned, not out of evasion but because the diary has other entries. There is no climate sermon, though the crowded ferries and the water shortages on Alicudi carry a quiet grudge.

The result is a film that observes and rarely instructs. Moretti comments on art, politics, and society constantly, but he does it as a man thinking aloud, not as a man handing out homework. The irony stays dry, the self-regard stays comic, and the diagnosis, when it finally arrives, is delivered with a glass of water and a bitter toast. Three decades on, it reads as a portrait of a specific temperament, and temperaments do not age into movements.