Nanni Moretti is one of the leading Italian filmmakers in the last thirty years, and with his latest film “Tre piani”, a melodrama whose plot spans thirty years, he presented himself in the main program of Cannes in 2021. And Moretti is no longer as close to form as he was twenty (Son’s Room), thirty (Dear Diary) or forty (Sweet Dreams, Mass is Over) years ago, but still the film in which he gathered an impressive cast was much better for me. than mostly lukewarm critics have suggested. The story revolves around four families living on three floors of a building in Rome, and Moretti and his frequent screenwriting collaborator Federica Pontremoli reworked the novel of the same name by Israeli writer Eshkol Nev.
This story hides a lot of surprises and the story is fine from the beginning to the end, and although it was stylistically done in a cold way, “Three Floors” was still a quality film. Lucio (Riccardo Scamarcio), Sara (Elena Lietti) and their initially five-year-old daughter live in the first apartment. They both have a lot of work to do, so their daughter often takes care of the older couple from the apartment across the street, Giovanna (Anna Bonauito) and the demented Renato (Paolo Graziosi). But one day old Renato will wander off with the little one and find them in the park, and Lucio will be sure that his uncle sexually assaulted his daughter. Wanting to find out what happened, Lucio will exaggerate and will cross the border with Renato and Giovanna’s grandson, teenage Charlotte (Denise Tantucci), who does not hide that she is in love with him.
Moretti himself played Vittorio, a judge who was obviously overly strict with his son Andrea (Alessandro Sperdute), who will run over a woman drunk right at the beginning. The father will never forgive his son and will consider a few years in prison to be a just educational measure and to the horror of his wife and Andrea’s mother Dora (Margherita Buy) he will not move a finger to help his son, but will give him up. At the heart of the third story is Monica (Alba Rohrwacher) who will give birth to a daughter the same day Andrea kills his wife. Her husband is often absent, and due to her loneliness, Monica seems to be beginning to experience delusions that are increasingly reminiscent of schizophrenia. And the story is fine here, although Moretti, somewhat surprisingly, completely deprived this drama of its recognizable humor, not cynicism, and it seems somehow cold, not emotional enough for this type of film.
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