Dear Diary

Nanni Moretti, playing himself, keeps a diary in three chapters. In the first, he rides his Vespa through an empty Rome in August, admiring the architecture of the suburbs, complaining about Italian cinema, and finally driving out to the bleak spot at Ostia where Pasolini was killed. In the second, he visits the Aeolian islands with a friend who has spent years studying Ulysses and refuses to watch television, until he becomes hopelessly addicted to soap operas. In the third, he tells the true story of a strange itch that doctor after doctor fails to diagnose, until it turns out to be cancer.

Moretti invented a kind of cinema with this: personal, essayistic, funny, and completely free. The Vespa sequence, with Keith Jarrett on the soundtrack, is one of the most joyful things in Italian film, a love letter to Rome and to the pleasure of just looking. The islands chapter is a comic gem about the madness of modern life. And the final chapter, built from his real medical prescriptions, turns his grumpiness into something brave and touching.

It won Best Director at Cannes. It is light and profound at the same time, a film where nothing happens and everything is in it: cities, friendship, illness, the pleasure of being alive. If you have never seen Moretti, start here, and then go to The Son's Room.