Death and Politics.(Nanni Moretti, The Son's Room)(Brief Article)

The Italian film director Nanni Moretti walks into an empty conference room at the Miramax home office in New York City, and before he does anything, before he even sips his cappuccino, he takes an article on Silvio Berlusconi in The New York Review of Books and turns it face down. "I can't bear to look at him," he says, smiling.

That's hardly surprising, since Moretti has long been known for his left-wing politics--and his solipsistic essaylike films that reflect those leanings. Films like "Palombella Rossa," his surrealist cri de coeur in which he stars as an amnesiac water-polo-playing communist; "Aprile," his caustic dissection of (among other things) both Berlusconi and the left, which he skewers with equal enthusiasm; and, perhaps most notably, "Caro Diario" ("Dear Diary"), the film that won Moretti best director at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. It is what its title suggests: Nanni proclaiming his love for the movie "Flashdance," Nanni remembering the great writer and director Pasolini, Nanni on a Vespa tour of Rome, Nanni on the elusive body itch that is finally diagnosed as Hodgkin's disease, which he lives to tell about. At one point he says: "Look what we've become. We shouted violent slogans. Now we're bitter and ugly. But not me, I'm a resplendent 40-year-old." And no matter how much he likes to remind you that he's played a schoolteacher ("Sweet Body of Bianca," in 1984), a priest ("The Mass Has Ended," in 1985) and other roles, he is, more than anything, an advertisement for himself--or at the very least for his alter ego, Michele, a self-absorbed but endearing satirist.

So what is surprising, then, is his latest film, "The Son's Room," a simple, straight-forward narrative about a family coming to grips with the loss of their teenage son and brother. It recently opened in the United States after capturing the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the first time an Italian film had won since Ermanno Olmi's "Tree of the Wooden Clogs" in 1978. "If I have changed a little bit as a director, that's probably because I've changed as a person a little," he says. The 48-year-old, who lives in Rome, has white flecks in his trademark beard now and a 5-year-old son with his wife, Silvia Nono. His gray oxford shirt, fashionably unfashionable, is complemented by a dashing, understated blue knit tie that looks as if it was handmade in Milan. He embodies that uniquely Italian persona: the stylish lefty.

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