The film chosen for the launch of last year’s Lavazza Italian Film Festival was Nanni Moretti’s latest Cannes festival pleaser, MIA MADRE, a mix of melancholy and madcap, starring Margherita Buy as Margherita, a film director juggling a production with a petulant star and the care of her terminally ill mother.

John Turturro gives a marvellously manic turn as the imported star who brags about his professional liaison with Kubrick, dries on dialogue, and bust some pretty impressive moves whilst simultaneously busting his director’s metaphorical balls.

The director herself is portrayed as a bit of a ball breaker, both on and off the set. She has recently split with her live in lover, and the dire diagnosis of her mother has created a reunion with her daughter and her brother, both prickly relationships precipitated by her own prickly personality.

In an on set meltdown, the Turturro character, Barry Huggins, screams he has had it with cinema and implores to crew and sundry to get him back to reality. The outburst is ironically comparative to the turmoil, conflict and contradictions his director is going through.

Moretti inter-cuts the family drama with the film within the film as well as dream sequences which gives MIA MADRE a discombobulated feel, which imbues the viewer with a vicarious sympathy as to the state of mind of Margherita.

Make what you will of a dream that has her trailing a queue outside a cinema showing Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire while Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat plays over.

MIA MADRE is currently screening at Palace arthouse cinemas.