A film can be an equation, a theorem, a narrative stretched between point A and point B. Or, it can be a stroll. A wandering. A drift. "Dear Diary" is the most sublime, intelligent, and moving of cinematic drifts, a work that rejects the tyranny of plot to embrace the erratic and associative form of thought, of a notebook, of a waking dream. Nanni Moretti, in 1993, commits an act of disarming sincerity and formal audacity almost unprecedented in mainstream Italian cinema: he films his own inner miscellany, transforming his neuroses, his obsessions, and his vulnerability into a cinematic essay that has the lightness of a Vespa ride and the depth of an existential treatise.

The film is a triptych, a structure that evokes a Renaissance polyptych more than a classic screenplay. Three autonomous but invisibly linked panels, connected by the gaze of their author. The first chapter, "In Vespa," is the quintessence of Baudelairian flânerie transposed to the deserted and metaphysical Rome of August. Moretti, astride his blue scooter, becomes an urban explorer, a sentimental cartographer who maps a city emptied of its inhabitants but filled with ghosts and meanings. This is not the chaotic, Fellini-esque Rome, nor the monumental, unattainable city of the great beauty. It is a suburban Rome of anonymous apartment blocks, of modernist architecture that Moretti comments on with the fastidiousness of an impromptu art critic. His drift is not random; it is a search for meaning in the everyday landscape. In this peregrination, Moretti becomes the seismograph of the culture of his time. The celebrated sequence in which he demolishes, with an almost physical fervor, the film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, is not simple cinephilia; it is an ethical declaration. It is the cry of a humanist against the fascination with evil for its own sake, a defense of a cinema (and a world) that does not renounce complexity, or compassion. His Vespa is a modern steed, an extension of his body and his thought, which leads him on a secular and moving pilgrimage to the Idroscalo in Ostia, to the site of Pasolini's murder. There, in the silence of that non-place, Moretti's cinema connects conceptually with its greatest maverick master, the corsair intellectual who, like him, used cinema and writing to probe the fractures of Italian society.

The second panel, "Islands," shifts the axis from the city to the archipelago, from interior monologue to impossible dialogue. The trip to the Aeolian Islands with his friend Gerardo, a monomaniacal, television-addicted academic, is one of the most ruthless and amusing satires on the incommunicability of the age of mass communication. Moretti seeks silence, the primordial beauty of nature, an island without distractions. Gerardo, meanwhile, is a human antenna that picks up only a television signal, obsessed with soap operas like The Bold and the Beautiful. The odyssey from Lipari to Salina, from Stromboli to Panarea and Alicudi, is a crescendo of comic frustration that lays bare two pathologies of the contemporary world: on the one hand, the intellectual who flees the world and idealizes a perhaps nonexistent authenticity; on the other, the modern man whose perception of reality is completely mediated and replaced by serialized fiction. Moretti does not place himself on a pedestal; his irritation with his friend is also a self-mockery of his own pretense of intellectual purity. The scene with the mayor of Stromboli, played by a magnificent Giulio Base, who governs a volcanic island with the mentality of a provincial councilman, is a small masterpiece of bureaucratic surrealism. The episode is a reflection on our need for narratives: some seek them in books and landscapes, and others find them in the face of Ridge Forrester. The final desolation of Alicudi, an island without television and without Gerardo, bitterly suggests that the much-coveted solitude can be just as empty.

It is with the third chapter, "Doctors," that the film transcends personal chronicle to touch upon the universal. Here, the drift is no longer geographical but corporeal, a journey inside his own ailing body. Moretti reconstructs, with a detachment that is the highest form of modesty, his real-life medical odyssey in search of a diagnosis for an unbearable itch and other alarming symptoms. The chapter is an almost Kafkaesque piece of cinema, an immersion in the absurdity of a healthcare system that multiplies tests, consultations, and abstruse diagnoses (dermatological, allergological, rheumatological) without ever getting to the heart of the problem. Moretti, armed with his diary and an almost scientific lucidity, becomes a detective of his own illness, scrupulously noting the contradictory prescriptions and superficial pronouncements of medical luminaries. The camera never indulges in pathos; on the contrary, it adopts an ironic, almost black-comedy gaze that makes the experience all the more chilling. Medical language, abstruse and dehumanizing, is exposed in its impotence. The final revelation—a Hodgkin's lymphoma, entirely curable if diagnosed in time—is not presented as a dramatic climax, but with the dry statement of a medical encyclopedia. The film closes with Moretti drinking a glass of water, a simple, everyday gesture that takes on the value of a rebirth. This ending, so subdued and powerful, elevates "Dear Diary" to the rank of a masterpiece: after wandering through the city and the islands, the real journey was within himself, a confrontation with his own mortality that redefines the meaning of every Vespa ride under the August sun.

In a sense, "Dear Diary" can be seen as the cinematic equivalent of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. Like the heteronym Bernardo Soares, Moretti is an "assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon" of the soul, recording fragments of life, sensations, and aesthetic and moral judgments without the pretense of building a system, but with the awareness that it is precisely in this fragmentation that the truth of existence lies. His démarche recalls that of great essayist-filmmakers like Chris Marker in Sans Soleil, capable of weaving philosophical reflections, personal memories, and images of the world into a unique and deeply personal tapestry. But unlike Marker's cosmopolitan melancholy, Moretti's is rooted in an exquisitely Italian context, that of the 1990s, an era of transition marked by the end of the First Republic and the dawn of the Berlusconi media empire, of which the "Gerard-ization" of culture is a premonitory symptom.

"Dear Diary" is a film that breathes. It doesn't have the breathlessness of narrative-at-all-costs; it takes the time to observe a building's facade, to listen to a song (the soundtrack, from Angélique Kidjo to Caetano Veloso, is a character in itself), to follow a thought to its bittersweet conclusion. It is the manifesto of a cinema unafraid to be personal, because it knows that in the honest and intelligent telling of an "I," one can find the reflection of a "we." It is a self-portrait that, like one by Rembrandt, does not hide its wrinkles and frailties, but rather makes them its greatest strength. A work that teaches us that sometimes, to understand something about the world and ourselves, we don't need a map—just a Vespa, a notebook, and the courage to get lost.