If Michael Moore Helped Tip an Election, He'd Be Nanni Moretti

CANNES, France -- Nanni Moretti is as bliss-buzzed as can be, a smiling pogo stick -- up, down, up, down -- dancing with his film friends, his cast and crew, his fellow left-wingers. Happy days for the lefties Italiano! They're jammed cheek-to-cheek and partying like fools into the early morning under giant white tents on the beach, slugging down the politically incorrect Chivas Regal (elixir of the oligarchy!), the whole place bouncing to the DJ's long-play of the Clash's "Rock the Casbah."

They have reason to celebrate. Moretti, one of Italy's most prominent directors and also an actor, is back at Cannes with his new film, "Il Caimano" (The Crocodile), which is in competition here, a contender for top honors. The movie was released in March in Italy, where it was a big box office draw -- and as controversial as a Michael Moore documentary.

The subject of his fictional but fact-based fare was the bleach-toothed crocodile himself, Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire (richest man in Italy) media and sports tycoon (he owns three national TV stations and the AC Milan soccer team) and former prime minister of Italy, who closely aligned himself with President Bush, sending Italian troops to Iraq and such.

A month after Moretti's film came out, Berlusconi and his right-center coalition were defeated by the slimmest of margins by the left-center, which just formed the new government headed by Romano Prodi.

Did the film tip the point? Did it energize the left? Or the right?

Italian politics, whew, is like a college term paper, with its coalitions, leagues, alliances and endless debates about who is a neo-fascist and what is a neo-communist, etc., and the governments fall and fail and are rebuilt, over and over.

But think of it this way: Nanni Moretti is Barbra Streisand. Or George Clooney. Just as in the United States, where spokesmen for the left and the Democrats for whatever reason are often Hollywood stars, this is the role that Moretti plays in Italy.

Actually, it's a role he plays along with Roberto Benigni -- the manic comedic actor known to Americans as the guy who accepted his Oscar for "Life Is Beautiful" in 1998 by climbing over the seats -- the other face of Berlusconi opposition.

Asked by a reporter in March whether he planned on seeing "Il Caimano," Berlusconi replied, "Absolutely not."

But in Cannes, the film is being applauded. We tracked Moretti down earlier this week for an interview, which we were told by a publicist was a relative privilege, as Moretti is not giving a lot of interviews, which we thought odd, since the entire point of the Cannes festival is the relentless commercial promotion of movies.

In person, Moretti, 52, is no clown, no Roberto Benigni. He sits, static, in a blue knit polo shirt and white linen pants, sipping a cappuccino, speaking Italian as a female interpreter translates. He is precise in his responses, somewhat didactic, the poli-sci professor. No cracking of jokes, no flamboyant hand gestures (which is surprising, as his movie -- forget the politics -- is funny in many moments).

The film, which doesn't have a U.S. distributor, is really a movie within a movie, about a sad-sack producer named Bruno (Silvio Orlando) whose business is about to go belly-up until a script is handed to him one day by a young first-time director (Jasmine Trinca) who wants to tell the story of Berlusconi's rise to power. The former prime minister is portrayed as a scheming, vain, bombastic heavy who, the film suggests, got into politics to escape bankruptcy and court proceedings.