La voce della luna
Encyclopedia
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 film
by Italian
director Federico Fellini
, featuring actors Paolo Villaggio
and Roberto Benigni
. Returning to themes he first explored in La strada
(1954), Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing. The odd couple, Ivo Salvini (Benigni), a fake inspector of wells, and Gonnella (Villaggio), a former prefect, wander through the Emilia-Romagna
countryside of Fellini's childhood and discover a dystopia
of television commercials, fascism, beauty pageants, rock music, Catholicism, and pagan ritual. It was Fellini's last film before his death in 1993.
, the acerbic tale focuses on the capture of the moon by the Micheluzzi Brothers while Ivo, newly released from a mental hospital, tries to seduce Aldina Ferruzzi with whom he's infatuated. Although she wants nothing to do with him, Ivo equates her blond beauty with the moon, the origin of his madness and frustration. During the attempts to woo her, he meets various madcap characters including an oboist who sleeps in the local cemetery, a man whose hobby is meditating on rooftops, and Gonnella, the ex-prefect fired for his rising paranoia. Gonnella makes Ivo his lieutenant and together they investigate the "wild conspiracies" going on around them.
The oddball pair attends a farcical beauty pageant where Aldina is crowned "Miss Flour of 1989" and ends up lost in the farmlands among graceful African women chanting in the moonlight. Inside an abandoned warehouse, they discover an Inferno-like disco of fashion victims bopping deliriously to Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel." Ivo realises that Aldina's shoe, obtained surreptitiously, fits every Cinderella who tries it on. To the dancers' stupefaction, Gonnella orchestrates a waltz but is thrown out after smashing the disc jockey's cache of records.
Meanwhile, the three demented brothers have caught the moon using gigantic farming equipment and roped it down in a stable. What ought to be a sacred event becomes a squandered opportunity as priests and politicians turn it into a conference for official propaganda voiced to the assembled public. The conference rapidly degenerates into violence by a madman with a pistol screaming, "What am I doing here? Why was I put here in the first place?" leaving Ivo Salvini with the film's last words: "If we all quieted down a little, maybe we'd understand something."
The consumer society critiqued in the Rome of La dolce vita
has moved to the suburbs where incommunicability, selfishness, voyeurism, and spiritual poverty characterise the chaos of mass media existence. In his twilight years (three years before he died of a heart attack at the age of 73), Fellini mounts an energetic assault on media moguls like Silvio Berlusconi
and the pandemonium of contemporary society by suggesting the escape into silence as a means to heal the psyche, the source of all true wisdom.
, Fellini began scouting locations on the Po
in September 1988 where he visited Reggiòlo, the hometown of the gifted Italian caricaturist Nino Za, his adolescent idol; the memories evoked reinforced his idea of returning to the provincial atmosphere of his early films. Although Fellini was still unsure about what he wanted to film, producers Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori
agreed to finance his project to the tune of fifteen billion lire. Pietro Notarianni, the production manager, and Danilo Donati
, Oscar winning Set and Costume Designer, engaged in a heated dispute over costs. Donati quit and was replaced by Dante Ferretti
.
To help organise his ideas, Fellini decided to build a town outside Rome on the via Pontina near Dinocittà, the former film studio of producer Dino De Laurentiis
. With Dante Ferretti, he constructed a church, a piazza, apartment blocks, shops, and a hairdresser's boutique, all designed in a parody of styles. Although no genuine script was ever completed, Fellini managed to conceive entire scenes each day by observing his actors improvising on the set, rather like puppets in a doll's house.
Principal photography started on February 22, 1989. According to biographer Tullio Kezich
, the film "will be remembered as one of the most serenely uninhibited of Fellini's sets... At the final dinner in mid-June, the last time that the troupe will convene, Benigni outdoes himself and recites a wonderful poem in ottava rima, recounting everything that had happened and been felt over the last months".
, Tullio Kezich
, and Aldo Tassone along with a few outright pans. Although it did poor business in France, it was acclaimed in Le Monde
and Positif
, and graced the cover of Les Cahiers du Cinéma which saw it as a winning diatribe on the excesses of Guy Debord
's "society of spectacle".
The film screened out of competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival
, where it was panned, misunderstood or ignored by the majority of North American critics. One critic boasted, "Absolutely ravishing. I've never been so bored in my life".
The film's oneiric structure based in part on a dialectical interplay of forms (e.g. the moon's circular brightness / the black circle of the mouth of a well / the circular peephole for spying on / the squaring of the circle in TV screens) as well as the quirky, cryptic plot informed by Fellini's belief in a personal and poetic fantasy did nothing to enhance it with movie goers or with critics.
Due in some measure to an uncompromising European optic, the lack of an adequate script, an over-reliance on improvisation, and a refusal to entertain for its own sake, the maestro's last film became his first never to find a North American distributor.
1990 in film
The year 1990 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* CGI technique is expanded with motion capture for CGI characters, used in Total Recall .* The first digitally-manipulated matte painting is used, in Die Hard 2....
by Italian
Cinema of Italy
The history of Italian cinema began just a few months after the Lumière brothers had patented their Cinematographe, when Pope Leo XIII was filmed for a few seconds in the act of blessing the camera.-Early years:...
director Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
, featuring actors Paolo Villaggio
Paolo Villaggio
Paolo Villaggio is an Italian actor, writer, director and comedian.-Life:Villaggio was born in Genoa in 1932. His jobs included being a clerk for the Italsider steel major which inspired his character "Il ragioniere Fantozzi Ugo", "the accountant Ugo Fantozzi"...
and Roberto Benigni
Roberto Benigni
Roberto Remigio Benigni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI is an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and director of film, theatre and television.- Early years :...
. Returning to themes he first explored in La strada
La Strada
La Strada is a 1954 Italian neorealist drama directed by Federico Fellini in which a naïve young woman is sold to a brutish man and goes on the road as a part of his itinerant show....
(1954), Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing. The odd couple, Ivo Salvini (Benigni), a fake inspector of wells, and Gonnella (Villaggio), a former prefect, wander through the Emilia-Romagna
Emilia-Romagna
Emilia–Romagna is an administrative region of Northern Italy comprising the two historic regions of Emilia and Romagna. The capital is Bologna; it has an area of and about 4.4 million inhabitants....
countryside of Fellini's childhood and discover a dystopia
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
of television commercials, fascism, beauty pageants, rock music, Catholicism, and pagan ritual. It was Fellini's last film before his death in 1993.
Plot
With a nod to the lunar-obsessed lyrics of Italian poet Giacomo LeopardiGiacomo Leopardi
Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi was an Italian poet, essayist, philosopher, and philologist...
, the acerbic tale focuses on the capture of the moon by the Micheluzzi Brothers while Ivo, newly released from a mental hospital, tries to seduce Aldina Ferruzzi with whom he's infatuated. Although she wants nothing to do with him, Ivo equates her blond beauty with the moon, the origin of his madness and frustration. During the attempts to woo her, he meets various madcap characters including an oboist who sleeps in the local cemetery, a man whose hobby is meditating on rooftops, and Gonnella, the ex-prefect fired for his rising paranoia. Gonnella makes Ivo his lieutenant and together they investigate the "wild conspiracies" going on around them.
The oddball pair attends a farcical beauty pageant where Aldina is crowned "Miss Flour of 1989" and ends up lost in the farmlands among graceful African women chanting in the moonlight. Inside an abandoned warehouse, they discover an Inferno-like disco of fashion victims bopping deliriously to Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel." Ivo realises that Aldina's shoe, obtained surreptitiously, fits every Cinderella who tries it on. To the dancers' stupefaction, Gonnella orchestrates a waltz but is thrown out after smashing the disc jockey's cache of records.
Meanwhile, the three demented brothers have caught the moon using gigantic farming equipment and roped it down in a stable. What ought to be a sacred event becomes a squandered opportunity as priests and politicians turn it into a conference for official propaganda voiced to the assembled public. The conference rapidly degenerates into violence by a madman with a pistol screaming, "What am I doing here? Why was I put here in the first place?" leaving Ivo Salvini with the film's last words: "If we all quieted down a little, maybe we'd understand something."
Cast
- Roberto BenigniRoberto BenigniRoberto Remigio Benigni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI is an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and director of film, theatre and television.- Early years :...
- Ivo Salvini - Paolo VillaggioPaolo VillaggioPaolo Villaggio is an Italian actor, writer, director and comedian.-Life:Villaggio was born in Genoa in 1932. His jobs included being a clerk for the Italsider steel major which inspired his character "Il ragioniere Fantozzi Ugo", "the accountant Ugo Fantozzi"...
- Gonnella - Nadia Ottaviani - Aldina
- Marisa Tomasi - Marisa
- Angelo Orlando - Nestore
- Susy Blady - Susy
- Dario Ghirardi - Journalist
- Dominique Chevalier - 1st Micheluzzi Brother
- Nigel HarrisNigel HarrisNigel Harris may refer to:*Nigel Harris , British economist*Nigel Harris *Nigel MacArthur, British broadcaster under the pseudonym Nigel Harris...
- 2nd Micheluzzi Brother - Daniela Airoldi
- Stefano Antonucci
- Ferruccio Brembilla
- Stefano Cedrati
- SimSim (actor)Sim was a French humorist, writer and comedian.Born as Simon Jacques Eugène Berryer, he was part of the team of Les Grosses Têtes, a humoristic program on radio and TV...
Themes
In Ermanno Cavazzoni's 1987 novel, Il poema dei lunatici (The Lunatics' Poem) on which the film is loosely based, Fellini recognized an abandoned project about filming the natural world: "the soil, the seasons, sun and rain, day and night. He likes the notion that at night the water in the well is awakened by the moon and starts uttering faint messages" to those prepared to listen. Unfortunately, few are permitted - let alone prepared - to listen in the infernal uproar of a postmodern world where blaring television commercials and beeping satellites drown out poetry, silence, and the voice of the moon.The consumer society critiqued in the Rome of La dolce vita
La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita is a 1960 comedy-drama film written and directed by the critically acclaimed director Federico Fellini. The film is a story of a passive journalist's week in Rome, and his search for both happiness and love that will never come...
has moved to the suburbs where incommunicability, selfishness, voyeurism, and spiritual poverty characterise the chaos of mass media existence. In his twilight years (three years before he died of a heart attack at the age of 73), Fellini mounts an energetic assault on media moguls like Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi , also known as Il Cavaliere – from knighthood to the Order of Merit for Labour which he received in 1977 – is an Italian politician and businessman who served three terms as Prime Minister of Italy, from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006, and 2008 to 2011. Berlusconi is also the...
and the pandemonium of contemporary society by suggesting the escape into silence as a means to heal the psyche, the source of all true wisdom.
Production
After writing a short treatment in two weeks with Tullio PinelliTullio Pinelli
Tullio Pinelli was an Italian screenwriter best known for his work on the Federico Fellini classics I Vitelloni, La strada, La Dolce Vita and 8½.-Biography:...
, Fellini began scouting locations on the Po
Po River
The Po |Ligurian]]: Bodincus or Bodencus) is a river that flows either or – considering the length of the Maira, a right bank tributary – eastward across northern Italy, from a spring seeping from a stony hillside at Pian del Re, a flat place at the head of the Val Po under the northwest face...
in September 1988 where he visited Reggiòlo, the hometown of the gifted Italian caricaturist Nino Za, his adolescent idol; the memories evoked reinforced his idea of returning to the provincial atmosphere of his early films. Although Fellini was still unsure about what he wanted to film, producers Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori
Vittorio Cecchi Gori
Vittorio Cecchi Gori is an Italian film producer and politician.Born in Florence, he is the son of Mario Cecchi Gori. He has produced numerous films, most notably Il Postino , which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.He was also senator from the Italian People's Party.He owned...
agreed to finance his project to the tune of fifteen billion lire. Pietro Notarianni, the production manager, and Danilo Donati
Danilo Donati
Danilo Donati was an Italian costume designer and production designer. He won the Academy Award for Costume Design twice: the first time for his work in Romeo and Juliet , the second time for his work in Fellini's Casanova...
, Oscar winning Set and Costume Designer, engaged in a heated dispute over costs. Donati quit and was replaced by Dante Ferretti
Dante Ferretti
Dante Ferretti is an Italian production designer, art director and costume designer for films.In his career, Ferretti has worked with many great directors, both American and Italian, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Terry Gilliam, Franco Zeffirelli, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford...
.
To help organise his ideas, Fellini decided to build a town outside Rome on the via Pontina near Dinocittà, the former film studio of producer Dino De Laurentiis
Dino De Laurentiis
Agostino "Dino" De Laurentiis was an Italian film producer.-Early life:He was born at Torre Annunziata in the province of Naples, and grew up selling spaghetti produced by his father...
. With Dante Ferretti, he constructed a church, a piazza, apartment blocks, shops, and a hairdresser's boutique, all designed in a parody of styles. Although no genuine script was ever completed, Fellini managed to conceive entire scenes each day by observing his actors improvising on the set, rather like puppets in a doll's house.
Principal photography started on February 22, 1989. According to biographer Tullio Kezich
Tullio Kezich
Tullio Kezich was an Italian film critic, screenwriter, playwright and actor.Kezich was born in Trieste...
, the film "will be remembered as one of the most serenely uninhibited of Fellini's sets... At the final dinner in mid-June, the last time that the troupe will convene, Benigni outdoes himself and recites a wonderful poem in ottava rima, recounting everything that had happened and been felt over the last months".
Critical reception
Aided by the immense popularity in Italy of comic actors Benigni and Villaggio, the film was a reasonable success with audiences there, receiving enthusiastic reviews from Alberto MoraviaAlberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism....
, Tullio Kezich
Tullio Kezich
Tullio Kezich was an Italian film critic, screenwriter, playwright and actor.Kezich was born in Trieste...
, and Aldo Tassone along with a few outright pans. Although it did poor business in France, it was acclaimed in Le Monde
Le Monde
Le Monde is a French daily evening newspaper owned by La Vie-Le Monde Group and edited in Paris. It is one of two French newspapers of record, and has generally been well respected since its first edition under founder Hubert Beuve-Méry on 19 December 1944...
and Positif
Positif (magazine)
Positif is a French film magazine, founded in 1952 by Bernard Chardère. It was published by Eric Losfeld.It often acted as a counterpoint to Cahiers du cinéma, another well-known French film journal, notably with Gerard Gozlan's article sarcastically titled "In Praise of André Bazin."The current...
, and graced the cover of Les Cahiers du Cinéma which saw it as a winning diatribe on the excesses of Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
's "society of spectacle".
The film screened out of competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival
1990 Cannes Film Festival
- Jury :*Bernardo Bertolucci *Alexei Guerman *Anjelica Huston *Bertrand Blier *Christopher Hampton*Fanny Ardant *Françoise Giroud *Hayao Shibata *Mira Nair *Sven Nykvist...
, where it was panned, misunderstood or ignored by the majority of North American critics. One critic boasted, "Absolutely ravishing. I've never been so bored in my life".
The film's oneiric structure based in part on a dialectical interplay of forms (e.g. the moon's circular brightness / the black circle of the mouth of a well / the circular peephole for spying on / the squaring of the circle in TV screens) as well as the quirky, cryptic plot informed by Fellini's belief in a personal and poetic fantasy did nothing to enhance it with movie goers or with critics.
Due in some measure to an uncompromising European optic, the lack of an adequate script, an over-reliance on improvisation, and a refusal to entertain for its own sake, the maestro's last film became his first never to find a North American distributor.
Further reading
- Degli-Esposti, Cristina (1994). "Voicing the Silence in Federico Fellini's La voce della luna". Cinema Journal Volume 33, n° 2, Winter.
- Marcus, Millicent Joy (1993). "Fellini's La Voce Della Luna: Resisting Postmodernism". In: Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and literary Adaptation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- — (1992). "Miss Mondina, Miss Sirena, Miss Farina: The Feminized Body-Politic from Bitter Rice to La voce della luna." RLA: Romance Languages Annual, Volume 4, p. 296-300.
- O'Healy, Aine. "Interview with the Vamp: Deconstructing Femininity in Fellini's Final Films". (Interview, The Voice of the Moon) In: Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives Frank Burke and Marguerite R. Waller (ed.)(2002), Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 209-32. Zambelli, Massimo (1997). Campane nel pozzo: 'La voce della luna': il testamento spirituale di Federico Fellini Rimini: Il cerchio.