Three Floors (Nanni Moretti, 2021) (Patreon)

Moretti's latest is bizarre. The film hurtles from incident to incident, almost as if an entire season of some middling prestige-TV entry had been edited down to a mere two hours. It's also tonally inscrutable. Random life-shattering events that seem to cry out for Sirkian treatment are presented with a dour middlebrow realism. Now, it's been quite some time since I've really liked a Moretti film (checks logs) -- eek, not since Caro Diario (although I still haven't seen Aprile, that film's de facto sequel). And when compared with the toothless satire of We Have a Pope or the preening self-regard of The Caiman, (see below) Three Floors is at least diverting.

But that's not enough to make it a good film. Much of the difficulty here is formal. Moretti might've selected any one of the three plot strands, expanded it to feature length, and produced a film that at least made sense as a discrete cinematic object. As is, we have three narrative strands, each with its own sub-strand, and virtually everything is played in the same basic register. Events range from the relatively mundane (a son buckling under the expectations of his conservative father; a new mother struggling with the absence of her husband) to the frankly Almodóvarian (sex with underage girls; a generational post-partum curse; a third-act firebombing). What on earth is Moretti going for?

While we can be grateful that the three stories don't really intersect, aside from the characters' occasional proximity (they all live in the same building), Three Floors displays no real flair for weaving the various threads. For the most part, Moretti shuffles among the plots with straight cuts, ending each sequence after some obvious bit of declarative business. After high-tension scenes, he will slowly fade. It's all remarkably televisual, the film's organization strongly resembling nighttime soaps like This Is Us or A Million Little Things. But again, TV does all of this much better, since the season-long pacing allows for the development of character and context. 

So really, Three Floors is Moretti's dull, overstuffed version of a telenovela. If I were inclined to be generous, I might suspect that Moretti has some secret political reason for making such a cluttered but unambitious piece of cinema. Maybe he now thinks that there's a reason to take preposterous popular entertainments seriously, because of their reach and their cross-class affective impact. But even giving Moretti every possible benefit of the doubt, Three Floors is a failure. No more wasting time on these late-period duds. It's high time I go back and watch some of those early Moretti films I've never seen -- Ecce Bombo, The Mass Is Ended, Palombella Rossa -- to find out why anybody cared in the first place.

NOTE: As per the discussion with Nicolas below, I went back to look at my review of The Caiman. Indeed, I think I remembered it as being a different film than it actually is. My remarks suggest I was lukewarm on it, but still, it's clear Moretti was attempting something critical with respect to Berlusconi, which places him above Sorrentino (whose Loro I could not finish). I retract my earlier remarks.