The Caiman (2006)

I liked Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room quite a lot, so therefore I was excited about watching another Moretti movie. The Caiman turned out to be very different from the aforementioned film, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I remember The Son's room as a serious film about grief - serious, but not sentimental. This film might be serious as well, but it is a far more whimiscal affair. A producer of B-movies has not been making any movies for a long time. Now he should be making a film for the big audiences but that doesn't happen. In this precarious situation, he gets involved with a project the political dimension of which he has not realized. The problem with the film is that it is plenty of things at the same time and that everything seems to be done a bit half-heartedly (in this case, the film-within-the-film trick doesn't work so good, because there is no real tension between the two segments). Yes, the film's satire is sometimes funny, but somehow making successful satire based on Silvio Berlusconi is a challenging endeavour, as the man seems to be a parody of himself. The Caiman has the heart in its right place but as a film - it doesn't really happen.