Nanni Moretti's the Mass Is Ended

CHAPTER 17 EPIPHANIES: NANNI MORETTI’S THE MASS IS ENDED The Mass Is Ended (1985), the third feature by the Italian director Nanni Moretti and the first to be released in the United States (to be followed by Dear Diary in 1993 and The Son’s Room in 2001), is simple but subtle, aggressive yet winning. The Mass Is Ended was made in 1985; it took three years to get to the United States and left quickly, after receiving a lukewarm to negative response from the New York press, which never knows quite what to do with new works from unheralded directors. Moretti has become known as the “Italian Woody Allen” because he writes, directs, and stars in movies that frequently feature autobiographical threads in addition to mixing humor with pathos. But there is none of Allen’s (rapidly vanishing) physical comedy in Moretti’s work; there is no physical resemblance between two men (the Italian is tall, slim, bearded, and good-looking); and, for all its comic touches, Moretti’s cinema is predominantly, uniquely serious in modes much deeper than Allen could ever hope to explore. Moreover, the central position of psychoanalysis in Allen’s life and films is often replaced, in Moretti’s, with politics. Red Wood Pigeon (1989), for example, was about the problems of a politically radical water- polo player—which the leftist Moretti himself once was, on the Italian national team—while Ecce Bombo (1978) concerned a disillusioned student’s struggle to recover the fervor of his erstwhile political militancy. The Mass Is Ended, for its part, is a comedy-drama in which Moretti himself plays a priest in a modern-day, citified Italy not as smitten with priests and the Catholic Church as it once was—if it ever was … (Moretti has played the lead in a number of his films to date, in addition to directing them and writing or co- writing their scripts.) He’s known as Giulio in the film, and our first glimpse of him, in the opening shots, is in ordinary clothing, not in his habit. In this sequence he walks alone, fishes alone, then swims alone in a long shot that emphasizes his solitariness. We don’t discover that he’s a priest until, in the next sequence, we watch him perform a marriage. Moretti the director has thus established from the first—and established visually, not through language—that this will be the story of a man who is also a priest, not of a priest whose character as a man is more or less beside the point. Right after marrying the couple, Giulio leaves his island parish with them for Rome, his hometown, where they will honeymoon and where he will take over a small church on the outskirts of the city—a church that has fallen on hard times after losing its former priest to marriage and, insult to injury, to a home right across the 169 Chapter 17 Figure 51. Nanni Moretti: The Mass Is Ended, 1985 (Italy) street. The first shot in Rome is of Giulio’s back as he sits on a wall overlooking the city, and it sets the tone for what follows (we will get several more shots of his back during the film): his growing frustration in an urban world over which he in particular and the Church in general have less and less influence. To be sure, The Mass Is Ended is a comic as well as a serious look at Giulio’s frustration, and one excellent example of both strains occurs on his first day at his new church. He is napping on a cot in his stark quarters when a soccer ball comes flying through the window. Giulio sullenly picks it up and walks out the door to find a courtyard full of boys. He moves toward them and they back off—all of this in nearly choreographed movement. Then he kicks the ball into their midst and joins in the game. Soon, however, he trips, hits the asphalt, and doesn’t get up; the boys, whom one would expect to rush to his aid, completely ignore him and continue playing. Moretti has given us a small comic ballet in this scene, but he has also told us that Giulio’s priestly authority is largely symbolic and very vulnerable to the hazards—the heedlessness—of modern existence. To emphasize his point cinematically, he includes a number of overhead or high-angle shots, of Giulio on his cot and of Giulio playing soccer, which make the character appear smaller and weighed down. Giulio’s sphere of declining influence begins, or perhaps it would be better to say ends, with his family. He is happy to be able to see his parents and sister again 170.

Load more