Margherita Buy: «” Three floors “has changed Nanni Moretti»

Three floors by Nanni Moretti, after a year stopped at the traffic lights due to the Covid emergency and the recent passage to the Cannes Film Festival, finally arrives in cinemas (from today). At the end of the screening, one wonders if we are facing a new Moretti, if the director of the Son’s room has changed. We ask this in our video interview with his fetish actress, Margherita Buy.

But first let’s frame Three floors. This is Moretti’s first feature film based on a novel (by the Israeli Eshkol Nevo). Nanni moves the location from Tel Aviv to Rome, changes the social context and extends the time span. Here he inserts the three protagonist families who live in the same building.

On the third floor are the two judges Dora (Margherita Buy) and Vittorio (Moretti), upright with my son Andrea (Alessandro Sperduti) after a car accident that causes the death of a woman; Monica lives on the second (Alba Rohrwacher) struggling with the growth of the newborn Beatrice and with the loneliness caused by the distance of her husband (Alessandro Preziosi).

At the first one lives Lucio instead (Riccardo Scamarcio) and Sara (Elena Lietti), the parents of little Francesca who often entrust to Renato and Giovanna, neighbors of a certain age. One day the unexpected happens: the forgetful Renato gets lost in the neighborhood with Francesca. Lucio fears that something irreparable has happened.

Nanni addresses issues such as obsession, justice, guilt, but above all the responsibilities of parents towards their children: how much do parents’ decisions and their behaviors think about a child’s life? Often heavily. The director de Son’s room the poison that adults graft in their veins hits us in the face and questions the future of the younger generations.

Here is the famous question we ask Margherita Buy, who knows Moretti very well (he has worked with him on four films): «Has this changed with this new job? “Everyone changes, because Nanni shouldn’t? », He replies without hesitation,« he too has lived through many experiences and for the first time wanted to make a film based on a novel. This is already a big change», Underlines the actress,« he chose Nevo’s book to tell about himself too. Three floors it’s a painful movie».

Many of his films are painful, but the unmistakable Morettian irony softened the atmosphere (there is no trace here). «But there was no need here», says Margherita, «it would have been out of place. Nanni was strict with the book which is even tougher than the movie. Nanni did not want to leave that track. Three floors is no more raw than his other films: tells about our obsessions and our fears of human beings. In other films he has recounted the invented and real pain, his illness, the death of a son and the crisis of a Pope.

For Alba Rohrwacher it was the first time on the set with Moretti: «I had confirmation of the great care with which the work was faced every day», he explains, «of those months I have a crystalline, intact and indelible memory so much we were focused on the characters. I loved Monica“, points out, “I loved her vulnerability and being a woman lost in a world bigger than her ».