Acting
While touring in Italy, a recently-widowed American opera singer has an incestuous relationship with her 15-year-old son to help him overcome his heroin addiction.
Yerma wants a child but with her dispassionate husband has failed to conceive. On the other hand, Victor courts her but the sense of caste and honor prevent from surrendering to him.
Michele is a young filmmaker frustrated by the lack of understanding his work receives and at odds with the film industry, especially a colleague making a musical on the '68 student protests. As he struggles to complete his own film about Freud's mother, Michele's insecurity and creative block manifest in a series of unsettling nightmares. Nanni Moretti's self-inquiry into cinema, political ennui, and men's relationships with their mothers.
In La prova generale, Carlo (Carlo Cecchi) interviews with a tape machine and a microphone his young lover while the two wander in the beautiful splendour of a wood on the edge of the city.
A mute mother stands by idly as her young children radicalise as a result of a society that thrives on conflict and manipulation. As she is drawn to a group of political activists, her absence allows her children to become increasingly extreme in their behaviour and lethal games they play.
