Not perfect, but sincerely. "Dear Diary" - the winner of the Cannes awards, in general quite ordinary cinema, boring and aimless. Moretti hardly, as a director, realizes the need to work with the temporality of the picture, he does not understand that it is impossible for 5 minutes of screen time to show the hero’s motorcycle drives through the streets, that it is impossible to immerse the viewer in a scripted hodgepodge of unfunny sketches, does not understand that the film result, like the idea, should be integral.
As usual in his tapes, Moretti tries to target Italian social and political institutions, criticizing them for their lack of spirituality and amoralism, but does it ineptly and almost unnoticed. Nevertheless, the unconditional success of the film was the episode with the viewing of the hero of the film “Henry – a portrait of a serial killer”, where the violence and aimless cruelty of the material scolds the hero of “Dear Diary” and forces him to take revenge on the arrogant film critic-intellectual who praises such obscenity. In general, intellectuals who betrayed their anti-bourgeois ideals and fell in love with the mass-cult vulgarity of television and film consumerism are the main idea of this film, implemented by Moretti not always successfully, although the hero of the picture is a neurotic leftist, vainly looking for an island of freedom in the space of the universally victorious bourgeois, is very convincing.
On the basis of this futile search, he even develops a nervous illness that even the most famous doctors cannot diagnose. In general, the third part of the picture is the most interesting and funny satirical sketch, in which, like a mirror, the consequences of social phobias and pathologies are reflected, it is the most temperate, does not sag and looks like a single comic sketch. Working on the film, Moretti does not beset himself or the rest of the actors in terms of acting unrestrained, allowing the national character to be fully realized in semi-Gypsy behavior. This is the scourge of most Italian comedies, ranging from the tapes of Monicelli and Risi and ending with the talented “Reality” Garrone, which could be avoided only by masters like Fellini and Scola due to the richness of the shades of their comic palette, but Moretti is not one of them.
Memorable and perhaps the most convincing comic type of “Dear Diary” was the image of a scientist-linguist studying “Ulysses” Joyce, who became dependent on television and exchanged all his intelligence and all erudition for him. The scene in which the hero Moretti asks on behalf of his friend-linguist Americans about the content of the new series of the series “Bold and Beautiful” is a symbolic expression of the subservience of today’s Europe in America, the worship of its mass cult idols.
Despite the general cheerful flair of most sketches, the tone of the "Dear Diary" can be defined as melancholy-pessimistic: culture is dying, intellectuals have abandoned their vocation of service to high ideals and fell in love with consumer goods, take refuge and find solitude from the universally prevailing vulgarity can only be found in places completely cut off from civilization and deprived of its benefits (now, for this liberation from the clutches of vulgarity, it is necessary first of all to go offline and immerse themselves in books), but even then, perhaps, a lonely truth-seeker who is already able to diagnose himself in an unjust life.
“Dear Diary” – despite the shortcomings of the formal plan, a very modern film about those who can not find themselves in the carousel of bourgeois life, about the search for themselves and meaning in a world in which everything went from the basics, where the truth was betrayed, where lonely lovers of truth are forced to perceive their thirst for light as a disease. This is a very sharp, critical film, a cry of pain, which could appreciate only in the time of Pasolini, it is about the general intellectual decline, and not only about the decline of cinema, architecture, literature and critical thought.
Capitalism destroys everything it touches, it defiles ideals and the search for truth with a thirst for profit and success. Socialism equalizes, strives for universal homogeneity, homogeneity of death, while capitalism is an insatiable desecration by money of every good impulse. It is about this predatory grin of the victorious bourgeoisie, which no longer has any enemies left, about the eternal loss of lonely truth-lovers, that Nanny Moretti shot his formally imperfect but sincere picture.