Three Floors

The fixed, self-serv­ing prej­u­dices of priv­i­leged white mid­dle aged men may not be such a good thing after all. That’s the far-from-rev­e­la­to­ry take­away from admired Ital­ian auteur Nan­ni Moret­ti​’s lat­est dra­ma, his first project to be adapt­ed from some­one else’s nov­el rather than his own orig­i­nal screen­play. The title refers to a posh city man­sion block, whose for­tunes unfold over ten years of inci­dent-packed tur­moil pre­sent­ed as a some sort of moral les­son for the rest of us.

On the ground floor, there’s a hard-work­ing fam­i­ly whose pri­ma­ry school-age daugh­ter is occa­sion­al­ly left with the seem­ing­ly nice elder­ly cou­ple up the stairs, until dad (Ric­car­do Sca­mar­cio) becomes con­vinced she’s been the vic­tim of improp­er advances from said old codger.

Mean­while, in the top flat with the envi­able roof ter­race, a stern judge (Moret­ti him­self, cast against type) refus­es to have any­thing more to do with their wastrel of a son after he caus­es the death of a pass­er-by in a drunk-dri­ving acci­dent, which puts his dot­ing moth­er in an awk­ward posi­tion. And halfway up the stair­well, a new mum (Alba Rohrwach­er) starts falling apart while hubby’s always away at work, and she’s for­bid­den to have any con­tact with his ami­able out­cast of a brother.

There’s a lot going on, then, but the three sto­ries don’t real­ly mesh to sig­nif­i­cant effect, though what does bind them is that the men­folk are stuck in their ways, right­ly but most­ly wrong­ly, and the sto­ic women have to make the best of it. Per­haps the Tel Aviv set­ting in Eshkol Nevo’s 2015 nov­el pro­vides more of an under­stat­ed con­text for all this tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty, but Moretti’s treat­ment gets the point over ear­ly on then keeps labour­ing it to weary­ing effect.

In his ear­ly days, Moret­ti drew com­par­isons to Woody Allen as a wit­ty and endear­ing screen pres­ence at the heart of his own films, which danced nim­bly through humour and heart­break. Here, late Moret­ti unfor­tu­nate­ly proves about as appeal­ing a much of lat­ter­day Allen – weak­er mate­r­i­al is treat­ed with a far heav­ier hand, prov­ing ulti­mate­ly rather dismaying.

Look back to, say, 2001’s The Son’s Room, a piv­ot point in Moretti’s fil­mog­ra­phy between essen­tial­ly com­ic and seri­ous modes, and the dif­fer­ence is chas­ten­ing indeed. The ear­li­er film picks its way through a heavy-duty theme (fam­i­ly bereave­ment) with con­sis­tent­ly-sur­pris­ing scene selec­tions which deliv­er earned emo­tion, yet here events fol­low each oth­er with an almost-audi­ble clunk.

The visu­als, the book-lined decors, the per­for­mances – espe­cial­ly Margheri­ta Buy, as engag­ing here as Moretti’s resilient on-screen mis­sus as she was cen­tre-stage in his ear­li­er Mia Madre – get by on a cer­tain suave classi­ness, yet there are seri­ous mis­judg­ments too. Espe­cial­ly con­cern­ing is the plot strand where an old­er man ends up in court after a sex­u­al encounter with an under-age ado­les­cent girl, where the sto­ry fol­lows a vic­tim-blam­ing path that’s uncom­fort­able view­ing in these post-#MeToo times.

Sure, we take the point that Moretti’s not exact­ly endors­ing the film’s errant male behav­iour, but did he real­ly have to tram­ple over this young woman’s dig­ni­ty to get the mes­sage across?

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