Italy’s Everyman

In a felicitous coincidence, the American Cinematheque in association with Cinecitta Holding scheduled its “I Am Self-Sufficient: The Films of Nanni Moretti” tonight through Sunday at the Egyptian, with Moretti himself on hand to present at 7:30 p.m. this evening “The Son’s Room,” which on May 20 became the first Italian film in more than two decades to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Critics have pointed out that “The Son’s Room,” about the impact of the sudden death of a beloved son upon a close-knit family, marks a dramatic departure for the 47-year-old filmmaker, who started shooting in Super 8 when he was 20 and has made 10 features over the past 25 years.

Over that quarter-century, Moretti has become a cult director in Italy and won numerous top prizes at European film festivals but is unknown in the United States except for a brief 1994 run of “Caro Diario” (Dear Diary). As the three-episode “Caro Diario” illustrated, most of his films do not travel well.

Although Moretti has an off-the-wall comic sensibility with an anti-establishment attitude and a graceful style, he is funny, often provocative, but he also seems parochial, his purported metaphysical concerns elusive--and he’s not a little self-indulgent and long-winded. More often than not he also stars in his pictures as his alter ego Michele Apicella, but he inspires respect, for Apicella and the films about him are marked both by a naked honesty and dogged persistence.

In general Apicella is pompous, hot-headed, outspoken, highly judgmental, tactless, rude, given to abstractions as a way of dodging emotions, looking for a mother’s love in his lovers and in general having trouble growing up. Most men, if we’re honest, will recognize some of our less attractive qualities in Apicella. To his credit, Moretti never tries to make audiences like Apicella.

Moretti is fortunate to have been able to strike enough of a nerve over the years on home ground to have allowed him the luxury of using his movies to work his way to his own maturity as an artist. All his films are worth watching as the work of a serious, ever-evolving film artist, but most of them are tedious, overly talky, overly long and linked closely to current political events in Italy at the time of their making.

By far the best of his earlier films and the only one that would have been worth chancing a U.S. release is the powerful and satisfying “The Mass Is Ended” (1984), which screens Saturday at 5 p.m. For once Moretti did not cast himself as Michele Apicella but as Father Giulio, a young priest, a former political radical who for some time has served an idyllic island parish. All of a sudden he’s transferred back to Rome, where he is faced with one crisis after another, personal and professional, and involving the past and the present. The great thing is that for once we’re shown a priest not in a crisis of faith or even of the constraints of celibacy, but confronted with being treated by and large as irrelevant by one and all and in turn raging at one and all for not behaving like good Christians.

For starters, Father Giulio’s first mass draws no one, just as his altar boys warn him, explaining that his parishioners started going to another church when their priest abandoned them to take up with his lover and her son in a residence just across the street from his former church. But there’s a school attached to the church where Father Giulio teaches while slowly trying to rebuild his congregation. Beset by problems of his family and old friends, Father Giulio finds his rage and frustration build until, in a beautifully sustained moment, he experiences an epiphany that at last enables him to embrace humanity as it is rather than as it should be. Funny, infuriating but finally transcendent, “The Mass Is Ended” is a richly rewarding experience.

The 1984 “Sweet Body of Bianca” (Friday at 7:30 p.m.) is of interest mainly as a warm-up to “The Mass Is Ended.” As Michele, Moretti is a math professor who has a new job at an experimental high school where his rigidity and formality at once put him at increasingly calamitous odds with the school’s laissez-faire philosophy and atmosphere. Just as Father Giulio is unsettled by his serenely happy predecessor’s errant personal life, the math professor is unhinged by the shenanigans of a neighbor couple. Unfortunately, while Giulio progresses toward the light, the nightmare- and fantasy-ridden Michele is drawn to the dark. “Bianca” isn’t as cohesive or absorbing as “The Mass Is Ended,” but it suggests through comparison with that film how arbitrary individuals resolve inner conflict in radically different ways.

“Red Wood Pigeon” (1989, Saturday at 9:30 p.m.), “Aprile” (1997, Sunday at 7 p.m.), followed by “Sweet Dreams” (1981) are of interest as reflections of Moretti’s concerns and his course of development as a filmmaker, but they can become tiresome pretty quickly. 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 466-FILM.

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The Goethe Institute’s third annual Blockbuster series of recent German films runs Tuesdays at 7 p.m. at the institute, Suite 100, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., through July 10.

Opening June 5, on a strong note, Yueksel Yavuz’s “April Children” is a classic immigrant drama in which children increasingly clash with tradition-minded parents. The central figure in this Turkish-Kurdish family living in an ethnic enclave in Hamburg is Cem (Bulent Estungun), a hard-working, responsible slaughterhouse worker who finds himself falling in love with a German prostitute (Inga Busch) at the very moment his parents are pressuring him into an arranged marriage.

As Cem’s emotional conflicts deepen, his cynical and ruthless younger brother Mehmet (Cernal Yavuz) is graduating from dealing in stolen merchandise to hard drugs while his younger sister Dilan (Erdal Yidiz) is becoming attracted to Mehmet’s best friend Arif (Kaan Emre). Yavuz takes an effective, understated approach, building tension slowly but relentlessly as the chasm widens between children and parents who have no comprehension of how they have been affected by coming of age in Germany instead of the old country. (323) 525-3388.