Sweet Dreams

(1981)

★ 7.1 IMDb · 105 votes

Genres: Comedy, Drama

Year: 1981

Runtime: 100 мин

Country: Italy

Director: Nanni Moretti

Cast: Nanni Moretti, Nicola Di Pinto, Laura Morante, Alessandro Haber, Remo Remotti, Piera Degli Esposti, Gigio Morra, Giampiero Mughini, Dario Cantarelli, Tatti Sanguineti

Plot

Michele is a young filmmaker frustrated by the lack of understanding his work receives and at odds with the film industry, especially a colleague making a musical on the '68 student protests. As he struggles to complete his own film about Freud's mother, Michele's insecurity and creative block manifest in a series of unsettling nightmares. Nanni Moretti's self-inquiry into cinema, political ennui, and men's relationships with their mothers.

A "modern" director is planning a movie about Freud and his mother relationship.His precedent effort about youth met mixed critical reception and some of his detractors claim that a farmer,a housewife and a shepherd could not relate to this heady intellectual stuff and the his cerebral cinema is irrelevant :the producers want dough ,and the only way to get dough is to make commercial palatable movies which can appeal to the masses.The director has got a rival who claims to be on her side ,but the "artist" wants to be unique and he does not want any emulator .An interesting short scene deals with a Don Siegel movie,a nerd claiming it's full of clichés whereas another one says that he (Siegel) makes a brilliant use of clichés.It is a lesson all critics (professionals or IMDb amateurs such as I )should pay attention too.Who are you to write this movie is this or that? It is very uneven ,funny in places ,but alas ,sometimes showing the worst aspects of the French Godardesque Nouvelle Vague :didacticism is rampant.The actors' playing,sometimes verging on hysteria ,is almost unbearable,in the scene when Freud plays the occasional street pedlar and in the sequence of the ridiculous directors competition .I like Moretti better when he depicts simple but poignant life stories as he does in "la Stanza Del Figlio" .