Caro diario

Directed by Nanni Moretti
Film Movement Classics
1993
100 Minutes
Italy, France
Italian, English, Mandarin
Biography, Comedy, Drama, Classics
Not Rated

Nanni Moretti recounts three entries from his “diary” in the hilarious and intimate self-reflective comedy CARO DIARIO, which follows the filmmaker’s musing on cinema atop a Vespa, a trip to the Aeolian Islands to work on his new screenplay, and his search for health and wellness after breaking out in a nagging skin rash.

Winner of Best Director at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, CARO DIARIO is a “heroic tale, told with a child’s wide-eyed wonder” (Film Comment) from a “modern movie man, for whom images have effaced the boundary between life and art” (The New Yorker).

Director & Cast

  • Director: Nanni Moretti
  • Starring: Nanni Moretti
  • Starring: Renato Carpentieri
  • Starring: Antonio Neiwiller
  • Starring: Jennifer Beals

Trailer

Photos

Reviews

  • "It’s a masterwork by a modern movie man, for whom images have effaced the boundary between life and art."
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker
  • "For all his apparent casualness, Mr. Moretti is a perfectionist who shapes his material with subtle care. With a seductive rhythm, the film alternates between wry encounters and lovely restful interludes, the latter presented so soothingly that they create a contemplative mood. (An elegiac, wordless visit to the place where the director Pier Paolo Pasolini was killed is one example.) Beautiful Italian scenery is also among this film's many pleasures."
    Janet Maslin, The New York TImes
  • "His "Caro Diario," a diary-film with all the rhythms and exaggerations of a good standup comedy act, isn't just a personal work. It's almost ferociously personal, dauntingly candid. "Caro Diario" won Moretti the Best Director's prize at the last Cannes Film Festival. (Among others, he beat out Zhang Yimou and "Pulp Fiction's" Quentin Tarantino.) Good as "Diario" is-and it's certainly one of the year's best comedies-it only whets your appetite for more. "
    Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
  • "Why do I love it? Why should you see it, if you haven't? Perhaps most of all for a sequence, a third of the way through, where the narration falls away and we follow Moretti to the place outside Rome where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered in November 1975 – vast, swooping takes filmed behind the Vespa, cut to an ecstatic piano improvisation by Keith Jarrett. It's made of light, movement, rhythm; flickering shapes and stillness. Which is, when you think about it, all that cinema really is."
    Andrew Dickson, The Guardian
  • "[One of] the three best movies you can watch at home now...it’s a fun, refreshing film for those yearning for a peek of the sunny Italian countryside and some musings on cinema and the self."
    Alissa Wilkinson, Vox
  • "[A] heroic tale, told with a child’s wide-eyed wonder."
    Film Comment
  • "Fresh and relevant yet always playful, “Caro Diario” features a modern Italian comedian, whose genius places him not only in the good company of Woody Allen and his elders too, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin."
    Emanuel Levy, EmanuelLevy.com
  • ""Caro Diario"... is held together by Moretti's wit, his self-effacing personality, and by his singular ability to conjure both joy and sadness out of the surreal. "
    Ken Shulman, The International Herald Tribune