It's a Nanni Moretti summer Why the Italian director's unmistakable style wins everyone over, just like his films
Stuffing yourself with bread and Nutella, riding around Rome on a Vespa, going out to dinner with Laura Morante (even if it didn't end all that well) and holidays on the most beautiful islands in the Mediterranean. Happiness is a serious business, and Nanni Moretti knows how to paint it on the big screen with sarcasm and scepticism, yet always with great style. Because even if they seem to hate everything about Italians, their casual, laissez-faire way of doing things, their ignorance and their sentimentality, Nanni Moretti and Michele Apicella (the director's alter ego in five of his first feature films) fully embodied the distinctly Italian charm of a summer enjoyed to the fullest.
In a past analysis of Moretti's cinema for Cinefacts, Fabrizio Cassandro perfectly sums up the director's style in a single sentence: «The generation Nanni Moretti belongs to is no longer willing to see itself represented by the Alberto Sordis and Monica Vittis directed by filmmakers with too many years behind them, but needs Vespas and checked shirts».
And checked shirts and Vespas are exactly what we're here to talk about, because while Nanni Moretti's filmography certainly deserves appreciation, raw and critical as it is, his wardrobe is no less worthy of attention.
Nanni Moretti's Uniform
Nanni Moretti's style is essentially Italian. Much like his films, it perfectly captures a generation of disillusioned Italians who, in the wake of the optimism of the 1960s, find themselves grappling with a country that has lost its bearings. And so he still wears Clark's, shoes that still carried a certain political connotation (think of them as the pre-Birkenstock Birkenstock), worn by university students and intellectuals as much as by the creatives of the 1970s, along with jacket-and-tie suits in questionable colours like pastel blue, and short-sleeved shirts strictly tucked into his trousers for those days when the Roman heat became unbearable.
Like all men who came of age in the second half of the twentieth century, Nanni Moretti has always appreciated dressing with a certain propriety. The T-shirt, the short-sleeved cotton kind, in his early films was something the director wore only for sport, or at most for scooter rides around a city emptied by the summer exodus. Grooming, on the other hand, during the years of I Am Self-Sufficient (1976), Ecce Bombo (1978) and through to Bianca (1984) is left to its own devices, perhaps the last true indulgence that the long-haired figures of 1970s counterculture had bequeathed to the artists who followed in their wake, Moretti among them.
But it is perhaps in Dear Diary, released in 1993, that the Roman director stirs the envy of the greatest number of Italians. Wearing his Persols, a beige linen suit and a checked shirt in shades of blue that mirror the colour of the waves behind him, the director writes that he is only happy at sea, when travelling between one island and the next he can give himself over to writing and escape into life experiences that have yet to take shape, but are waiting for him back on dry land. Is this not, after all, the pinnacle of happiness for any Italian, from the 1980s to today, who can't wait for the summer holidays to arrive so they can tell the world to go to hell and enjoy a little peace? Perhaps you prefer the moment he lands on Panarea, in his polo shirt with irregular white, red and blue stripes, and is immediately invited by an enlightened bourgeoise to a party «in homage to bad taste»? Perhaps not, you might say, eating a whole jar of Nutella completely naked beats any outfit. And you'd be right.
