I Am Self Sufficient
Released in 1976, directed by Nanni Moretti.
This is a film about people who are not on top of things, who are not even close to being on top of things, to whom things are nothing but remote wisps of cloud in the broad blue sky. Our hero is Michele Apicella (Moretti himself), layabout and aesthete, possessor of a truly beautiful head of hair (the fact that his hair is never mentioned explicitly in the film only adds to its mysterious, assumed potency – why is everyone tip-toeing around the fact that this man possesses such a rare follicular gift? Is it simply too overwhelming to even acknowledge?). This is Moretti’s first film, and Michele’s first appearance; Moretti will of course go on to a long career, and the character of Michele will serve as his avatar in several later works.
Even at this early stage, however, Michele is quite a developed presence, fruitful with poses and tics; the character feels well-worked and finely adjusted, like those of the generation of vaudevillians who brought their acts fully-formed from stage to screen – except that in this case Michele springs from a pre-existing life, not a pre-existing fiction. There is much vaudevillian about Moretti himself: the flexible frame, the poised silliness. He is another step down the road trod by Tati, not quite as tall (6’ to 6’3’’) but even more abstracted. Both were talented athletes, but while Tati found his comic footing in pantomimes of his rugby outings, Moretti exceled in that gloriously useless, untranslatable thing, water polo. And thus (thus?) whereas for Tati a joke is not quite a joke, for Moretti a joke is definitely not a joke, and he is wounded that you could even think so.
Michele begins I am Self Sufficient with a loss. His partner, Simona (Simona Frossi), wants to separate; Michele is not for the idea, but neither is he very actively against – less a loss maybe than a drifting away. They have a child together, Andrea (Andrea Pozzi), a stoic post-toddler who at first they share custody of. Both Simona and Andrea are inconsistent presences, occasioning reactions from Michele – Simona: tears and anger, Andrea: a distracted but warm caretaking – but never pressing him with any real sense of responsibility. This is an aesthetic choice – the film wants room to loll and flop around, space needs to be made for nonsense and ineffective diatribes. At one point Michele picks up the phone and in a stilted tone acts out requesting money from his father. After he hangs up he turns to a friend and asks if that’s sufficient to explain (to us, the audience) why he can keep his apartment and feed himself without any visible means of support. It’s clever, but a serious point. The emotional and financial status of the characters is largely determined by the kind of story Moretti wishes to tell, and since he is that story’s protagonist, vice-versa.
Left to his own devices, Michele finds himself joining an avant-garde theatre troupe lead by his friend Fabio (Fabio Traversa). The troupe scenes are a bit more absurd and slapstick than the surrounding material; their spirit is meant to be mean, because the troupe’s art is bad – the characters suffer for their art, but as punishment. It’s an interesting choice, because Moretti would seem to be sympathetic to the idea of non-commercial, experimental art; I am Self Sufficient was made for nearly nothing on Super 8. What then turns him against Fabio and the troupe? Is it purely a lack of aesthetic merit? I don’t think so. There is a deeper critique of a certain creative mindset, but that mindset isn’t something that can be easily specified. It’s better captured by stock phrases like “they’re idiots” or “they have no idea what they’re doing,” but those are at the same time too blunt. There is a very slight affection for the troupe’s follies, an appreciation of artistic failure and of the youthful obliviousness such failure requires. After they put on the big show they’ve been gearing up for all film, a critic (Beniamino Placido) delivers his assessment to Fabio. This critic is not a very serious figure, and we may not be poised to take his critique very seriously, but when he tells Fabio that he is stupid, that he is an illiterate, but that nonetheless he has achieved something with his performance, perhaps accidentally, but he has achieved something… then this seems actually quite sagacious, and like a nearly canonical assessment of the variety of bad art that goes awry though lack of self-knowledge.
Moretti is very keen to know himself – he’s put himself in a movie to examine, and he is happy to wield self-critique and self-mockery as tools. His desire to be known is not however commensurate, and Michele, as his stand-in, is in some ways fenced off from us. For one thing he is never good enough to be altogether clear to us – self-critique, when over-applied, obscures its object behind caricature. We are invited to laugh at Michele, and that should make us wary of thinking we can get to know him. Generally in a narrative when we are invited to laugh at a character it is exterior rather than interior circumstances that are being explored. In its most barbed approaches to Michele – around his relationship to his partner and son – the film wavers and becomes stylized, as if we are suddenly meant to understand that after all this is only a fiction. In one brief scene Michele meets with Simone to drop Andrea off with her. She goes to kiss him goodbye, but he evades her and they share an awkward, comic handshake instead. In voice over he tells us that he never saw her again. Presumably that would mean he never saw his son again either. No angst is evinced – and the statement and its implications are so awful that we chuckle nervously and move on. He couldn’t have meant it?
In fact Andrea’s presence in crucial to the film’s tenor. Vulnerable, he adds delicacy to the tone when the tone is soft, and when the tone is harsh we can remember his presence and be taken aback. When the film is surreal we worry – surrealism is dangerous for children (I mean, when they are inside it). Andrea’s physical world is beautifully specific – he has his playing cards, he has a toy hammer to ward off evil, he has a paper cutout theatre and a little theatrical troupe of his own that he can move around the stage with a magnetic wand. When it’s time to sleep Michele pushes their two small beds close together.
In this film spaces are often cramped. It’s set in Rome but thankfully we never see anything very nice looking. We see small rooms, bare walls, bits of pavement, bare tree branches. If the cars weren’t so tiny and stylish we could be in Buffalo, NY in late spring. Likewise nothing very pretty is allowed to go on in a scene, and again we are thankful. The moment we can anticipate what might happen next, Moretti cuts away – we can imagine him shrugging and saying fine, fine you get the picture, and rummaging around for something else to show us. A favorite technique is to pipe in some very cinematic music, that seems as if it must have significance, must be here to manipulate us, and then chop it off before it can do its work. We’re left bemused – what, so you didn’t want us to feel anything after all?
