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The Mass Is Over is an idiosyncratic comedy about the contemporary generation of post-1968 30 year olds in Italy. Director Nanni Moretti, who began his career shooting Super 8 films in Rome, led a new wave of successful young actor-director comics to notoriety several years ago.
This film confirms Moretti's status as one of only a few directors in Italy today who are concerned with contemporary Italian situations and nuances. Moretti plays Don Guilo, a late convert to the priesthood who was once a part of the radical sixties. Returning to his native Rome after a decade of service in a remote mountain village on a Sicilian island, Don Guilo will find quite a different reality to the one he had once known. Assailed by moral cowardice and spiritual disappointment on all sides, especially among family and friends, the young priest asks whether his vocation serves any purpose in the modern world. "We will never be divided", was once the ideal of his and his friends' youth, now it is a hollow shell.
The Mass Is Over is a comedy that can be seen as a continuation of Moretti's earlier film Bianca, but the characteristic sweet and sour pastiche of this Roman director has disappeared in favour of a paranoid dream world; it has the intensity of an obsessive personal metaphor.