BACK TO THE FUTURE

When Nanni Moretti entitled his most recent film La Messa è Finita (The Mass is Over), he little knew how appropriate the term would turn out to be. Since when can a film critic be compared to a sort of priest whom people turn to from time to time to christen (with a little help from his pen) increasingly inferior audio-visual products as «films»? Since when has there been neither mass nor sermon? Since when has the audience —adults, at the end of the day— ceased to do just what they felt like? And since when has the great Cannes «party» become a cathodic slaughter? Be that as it may, now, in 1987, faced with the crisis in cinema (above all a crisis in cinema halls), in the little world of the «professionals of the trade» some are beginning to lose their spirit, and others to lose their cool.