The Mass Is Over (1985)
His hopes shattered, now it is time for another place...
Genre : Drama, Comedy
Runtime : 1H 34M
Director : Nanni Moretti
Writer : Nanni Moretti, Sandro Petraglia
Synopsis
The young priest Father Giulio returns to Rome, his hometown, after a long pilgrimage. Don Giulio hopes to live peacefully with his family and his friends, but discovers that many of them are depressed or frustrated, and some suicidal.
Michele is a Communist MP who loses his memory in a car crash—although nobody seems to notice. Over the course of a water polo match ahead of election day, he starts to remember his past life, revealing the picture of a man whose personal and political identity crisis mirrors the one of Italian communism.
The film tells the story of the Michelucci family, from the nineteen-seventies to the present day: the central character is the stunningly beautiful Anna, the lively, frivolous and sometimes embarrassing mother of Bruno and Valeria. Everything begins in the Summer of 1971, at the annual Summer beauty pageant held at Livorno’s most popular bathing establishment. Anna is unexpectedly crowned “Most Beautiful Mother”, unwittingly stirring the violent jealousy of her husband. From then on, chaos strikes the family and for Anna, Bruno and his sister Valeria, it is the start of an adventure that will only end thirty years later.
An IT company hires an actor to serve as the company's president in order to help the business get sold to a cranky Icelander.
Eccentric and full of manias, Michele is a young high school professor who defines himself as “not used to happiness”. He realizes his life is meaningless if he doesn’t have a woman by his side but, after a series of rather disastrous experiences, he feels more alone than ever. Then, out of the blue, a new French teacher called Bianca arrives at school. Amongst uncertainties and contradictions, the two start dating. In the meantime, a series of homicides take place and a police officer begins to suspect that Michele is involved. Bianca will save him providing an alibi at the right moment, but then, everything goes wrong again.
April 24, 1993: it's the last broadcast of Radiofreccia, a small radio station that's closing after 18 years, barely one minute before coming of age. Bruno, one of its founders, starts to tell its story, which is also the story of a group of friends – especially troubled Freccia's – and a period of their youth in a little Northern Italian town.
Michele, Goffredo, Mirko and Vito are four friends who have participated in the battles of the student in Sixties. Now in the Seventies, the four friends don't know what to do, though young and with so many possibilities to find a job in life. Intellectuals marginalized and misunderstood, the four friends find themselves when they can in a restaurant to discuss their outlandish theories. A girl named Olga disrupts their life, but Michele is her favorite, although he does not know what to do with the girl.
Nanni Moretti recalls in his diary three slice of life stories characterized by a sharply ironic look: in the first one he wanders through a deserted Rome, in the second he visits a reclusive friend on an island, and in the last he has to grapple with an unknown illness.
Best friends Peppe and Mario are thieves, but they're not very good at it. Still, Peppe thinks that he's finally devised a master heist that will make them rich. With the help of some fellow criminals, he plans to dig a tunnel from a rented apartment to the pawnshop next door, where they can rob the safe. But his plan is far from foolproof, and the fact that no one in the group has any experience digging tunnels proves to be the least of their problems.
Michele criticizes the film industry and its inhabitants, and is particularly embattled with a Neapolitan director making a musical about the 1968 student demonstrations. At the same time, Michele has a creative block and struggles to finish his film titled "Freud’s Mother." Nanni Moretti’s self-inquiry into filmmaking, political ennui, and men’s relations with their mothers.
Peppino is an aging taxidermist constantly ridiculed for being short and somewhat creepy. He meets Valerio, a handsome young man fascinated by Peppino's work. Peppino, in turn, becomes entranced by Valerio and offers him a large salary to come work as his assistant. But when Valerio meets Deborah, their fledgling romance is threatened by an insanely jealous third wheel.
An impressionable teenage girl from a dead-end town and her older greaser boyfriend embark on a killing spree in the South Dakota badlands.
Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders his king and takes the throne for himself.
A grieving couple retreats to their cabin 'Eden' in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.
Three Italians travel to their hometown to vote for elections: Pasquale is a Southern immigrant living in Munich who's genuinely happy to come back to Italy, even if just for a few days, but the country he dreams of is far from reality; Furio travels to Rome with his family, but his niggling attitude threatens to push his wife Magda over the edge; young Mimmo is also going to Rome, but the trip is repeatedly interrupted by worries about his grandma's health.
Michele Apicella lives in Rome, in an apartment paid for by his father. Abandoned by his wife and his son Andrea, he occupies his time acting in an experimental theater company under the artistic direction of his friend Fabio.
Nanni Moretti takes another look at the ebbs and flows of his life in April 1996, as he becomes a father for the first time and seems unable to focus on his documentary about the upcoming national elections.
Three partisans bound by a strong friendship return home after the war, but the clash with everyday reality puts a strain on their bond.
At the end of WWII, an ambitious bootlegger and his nightclub-singing girlfriend assemble a ragtag bunch of misfits for an impossible heist: to steal Mussolini's treasure right from his headquarters.
After an encounter with UFOs, an electricity linesman feels undeniably drawn to an isolated area in the wilderness where something spectacular is about to happen.