The Critics: Cinema: `Aprile' is the dullest film

Nanni Moretti's eighth feature, Aprile, is the second, following the enormously successful Caro Diario (Dear Diary), in which he plays a film director called "Nanni Moretti". The April is that of 1996, a red- letter month for Moretti. Not only does the Italian Left win a long-despaired- of electoral victory over the neo-Fascist media baron Silvio Berlusconi, but the director's wife Silvia gives birth to their first child, an enchanting, dark-haired boy whom they name Pietro. And, like its immediate predecessor in the canon, this new film also constitutes a diary of sorts. In the course of the film Moretti discovers the joys and apprehensions of parenthood, dithers between two very dissimilar projects - a documentary about turn- of-the-millennium Italy and a musical set in the 1950s about a Trotskyite pastry chef - and generally contemplates his navel. Or, rather, films it in grainy close-up.

Now, just as there are people who believe that, somewhere in the world, each of us has a physical double, so a no less whimsical case could be made that only supremely great artists are possessed of absolute uniqueness and that for every lesser figure there exists, in at least one other culture or language, an uncannily lifelike mirror image. Nanni Moretti, for example, and Woody Allen.

Both Nanni and Woody, after all, are wiry, jittery chatterboxes chronically incapable of ever sitting still and shutting up. Both make films whose fascination derives less from the uncoiling of a tightly wound narrative line than from a constellation of idiosyncratic discursions and digressions. Both have an increasing tendency to construct those films primarily as vehicles for themselves. And even if, practically by definition, there's no such thing as an actor-director who isn't also a narcissist (Chaplin, Welles, Redford, Beatty, etc), both have arrived at a stage in their development when that narcissism has become so solipsistic as to verge on the pathological. In Allen's work, the stage was reached, for me, in a particular scene of Crimes and Misdemeanors; in Moretti's, it's finally come in Aprile.

In Crimes and Misdemeanors the scene in question was the one in which a horrified Allen listened to his sister's account of a traumatic rape of which she had been the victim. It was an extraordinary moment, quite without parallel in the mainstream American cinema. Yet even more shocking than the disgusting details of the atrocity itself - the rapist defecated on her - was the fact that for Allen, apparently, the rape mattered less than his own Woodyesque responses to it. ("Oh, Jesus, that's incredible!" "God, I just can't believe what I'm hearing", or exclamations to that effect.) Throughout the scene the camera was on him, not her; the trauma was his, not hers; she was the stooge, the "straight man", not he.

In Aprile, I'm afraid, the problem arises not just with one scene but with the film in its entirety. When Moretti, for example, travels with his crew to Italy's northern coastline, where a ship jammed with Albanian refugees has been sunk by local customs authorities, what comes across is less the callous indifference to human suffering of a supposedly liberal government than the lonesome, saintly humanitarianism of Nanni himself. When Silvia goes into labour, it's the nervous father-to-be's cute reactions to the event - pacing the hospital corridor, ringing up anxious relatives and friends, discovering the mysterious word "epidural" - that the camera adoringly indulges. And though, once their son has been born, Silvia more or less drops out of the picture (in both the generic and cinematic senses of the noun), that's still not enough for Nanni's monstrously all-consuming ego. Outposturing his own infant, he actually contrives to upstage poor six-month-old Pietro. One has heard of stealing sweets from a baby - but stealing scenes?

As in Dear Diary, Nanni the opinionated cinephile is much in evidence. In the earlier film, if you remember, he took a local journalist to task for giving a rave review to John McNaughton's ultra-violent Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Here, accompanied by the heavily pregnant Silvia, it's Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days that he catches up with. Later, desperately straining to erase the movie's corniest exchanges of dialogue from his memory, he curses himself for having exposed his as yet unborn, hence infinitely impressionable, offspring to such a dud.

Which is all very delightful and droll, I suppose. Except that, when you come right down to it, it's also nasty and gratuitous. I certainly have no axe to grind for either Strange Days or its director, but making a wholly unprovoked attack on Kathryn Bigelow, who is unlikely ever to have the oportunity of making a movie that attacks Nanni Moretti, strikes me as unworthy of a serious artist. A little solidarity is called for, surely, among colleagues, or else a discreet silence.

Moretti is, or was, a serious artist, responsible for such frequently dazzling films of the early 1990s as Bianca, La Messa e finita and Palombella Rossa (a political satire set almost entirely in a swimming pool). It seems to me, though, that he may now have approached a forking path in his career. In one direction lies the kind of cinema at which he's virtually unmatched - a cinema of the first person singular, to be sure, but one in which that first person, if singular, is never allowed to become the sole repository of truth, meaning and beauty on the screen. In the other lie ever more bloated exercises in complacent self-portraiture.

The most elementary solution would be for him to make a film in which he himself doesn't appear. For there's really no getting away from it. As an actor, Moretti is a ham. Parma ham, maybe, but ham nevertheless.