The only real swerve in Mia Madre occurs within its first few minutes. It opens with a line of chanting labor protesters making their way toward a line of riot police and engaging in a brawl. Abruptly, a voice calls cut, and it is revealed that the action is taking place on-set. The director of the movie within the movie, Margherita (Margherita Buy), pulls aside her crew to fix the framing of the action, instructing her cameraman not to get so close to the strikers so as not to goad audiences into getting invested in the violence. But the actual director, Nanni Moretti, is one stop ahead of her, framing the production with critical distance that soberly regards both the diegetic action and the budding contradictions and difficulties of the shoot.
Margherita comes across as a competent, clear-headed artist in early scenes, but soon her outward calm begins to crack. At home, she must contend with her ailing mother, Ada (Giulia Lazzarini), confined to a hospital bed as doctors run tests and perform increasingly severe treatments. The pressure of her mother’s inevitable impending death wears on Margherita. She becomes more and more irritable and aimless at work as the stress mounts. The confidence shown during that opening gives way to dreary platitudes given as instructions to the actors, including contradictory notions of how to act that even she admits cannot be reconciled.
Buy is fantastic as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Rarely dredging up the full melodrama of characters of her type, the actress instead finds small ways to communicate her total collapse. When Margherita and her calm, put-together brother (Moretti himself) bring their mother a meal in the hospital, his ease in conversation with his mother as he lays out all the food prompt curious reactions on his sister’s face. She smiles warmly at his soothing nature, but there is a tautness in her smile that suggests she sees her own emotional instability that much clearer when set against him. Gradually, she loses nearly all self-control, to the point that when a door-to-door power company salesman greets her at her mother’s apartment, she becomes so invested in their conversation, and so increasingly frantic, that the man decides to bail on a potential sale to excuse himself.
Moretti’s style is unadorned, but his largely invisible hand helps to make the more visually oriented demonstrations of Margherita’s crumbling façade all the more unsettling. Without much warning, a scene slides into flashback to show a younger Margherita displaying her capacity for self-destruction when she cracks, driving over and over into a brick wall. Moretti shoots this from two angles, both far enough to take in the madness without viscerally sharing it, which makes it all the harder to watch. Similarly, Margherita later awakens from a dream to find her apartment soaking in water, a moment handled so evenly that it borders on the surreal.
Sadly, whenever Buy is not central to the scene, the movie loses its focus. This is especially evident when the production’s American actor, Barry Huggins (John Turturro), arrives to play the factory boss in the labor rights film. Turturro long ago mastered flimsy boastfulness and false confidence, but Huggins is a tedious cliché of an insecure braggart and a repository for European jokes about American actors. Barry brags about his friendship with Stanley Kubrick (to whom he refers only by first name) and says Kubrick would have put him in a movie if not for his untimely death. Elsewhere, he is simply loud and arrogant. When his non-native pronunciation causes him to flub a line, he takes it out on the entire crew for daring to make him speak an Italian word he cannot quite grasp.
And though Moretti attempts to gently tie together various disparate elements—the politics embodied by the film within the film, the harried experience of filmmaking, fears of death— Mia Madre never manages to capture the complexity of life it seeks to convey. In fact, quite the opposite is true. As everything is reduced to parody, the story becomes so stilted and awkward that it begins to look like a film within a film about filmmaking.
While Moretti drew upon his own life for the story of a director juggling work and the death of a mother, his reductive characterization of the dying mother proves both the film’s most egregious failure and an indictment of Moretti’s drab obviousness. The strength of Buy’s performance manages to hide many of the film’s flaws. Unfortunately, we’re left wishing Mia Madre had tried less to capture the entire human condition and instead focused more on the nuances of its subjects.
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