List Item: Watch all of the “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die”
Progress: 843/1007
Title: Caro Diario (Dear Diary)
Director: Nanni Moretti
Year: 1993
Country: Italy
About 40% of the films that I have left to see for the 1001 list (at the time of writing) do not have English language dialogue. Given the recent surge in film watching, this is something I need to keep in check as I do not want my last 15-20 films to all be in a foreign language, or to all be in English.
So, for just that reason, I picked out Dear Diary as a film to watch – only to be pleasantly surprised with a satirical semi-autobiographical film with director Nanni Moretti at the centre. This is the first of his films that I have seen (The Son’s Room and Habemus Papem also being on my extensive watch list) and after this, I know I’ll be safe with his more comedic output. Moments of this had me laughing out loud.
Dear Diary is a film spanning three episodes, each of which are a satire about different parts of Italian life. In the first, there’s a more general satire about different thoughts in his head – where he goes between various trains of thought via his Vespa. The second has two strands, the many stereotypes of the Aeolian Islands and then the corruption of an intellectual by American soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. Finally, his story about his cancer diagnosis via a year of dermatology visits.
That last section is, obviously, not a laugh a minute. However, it’s still a very interesting look in his experiences and an interesting end point for a film where you really grow to love this director. The bit in the first episode where he fantasizes about being a night terror to a verbose film critic was especially good.
What I also loved about it was the breezy way that Moretti narrated and directed the whole picture. It’s like the chilled out fun road movie (sans cancer) that you sometimes need. It also serves to say that, sometimes, you need to get a second opinion about a medical thing that people are treating as just a dry skin condition. Also – I am never going to get electrical acupuncture. It sounds horrific.
Before I Kick 