The Voice of the Moon (1990)

Director: Federico Fellini

Screenplay: Federico Fellini

Based on the novel Il poema dei lunatici (The Lunatics' Poem) by Ermanno Cavazzoni

Cast: Roberto Benigni as Ivo Salvini, Paolo Villaggio as Gonnella, Nadia Ottaviani as Aldina, Marisa Tomasi as Marisa, Angelo Orlando as Nestore, Susy Blady as Susy

An Abstract Candidate

 

It seems my whole life is just this night.

Federico Fellini's last film, premiered outside the Cannes Film Festival competition in 1990, was tragically dismissed. It never got distribution in the UK until Arrow Video made it their task to release it in the late 2010s finally.

It begins introducing us to Roberto Benigni's Ivo Salvini, released from a mental hospital, starting from one night going on a journey through vignettes. Whilst it begins with a sense of humour, Ivo accidentally wandering into a nephew letting people pay to see his aunt undress, The Voice of the Moon feel streaked in melancholia of a different time. Based freely on a novel by Ermanno Cavazzoni, where Cavazzoni was taking his influence from the writings of real mental health patients, this film comes with the knowledge Benigni's character is a Holy Fool, with a fixation on wells which may pose a danger to him as others watch over him in fear of this, and with all the voices in his head. All we see is entirely subjective from his perspective. He is an outsider who will be ignored, and whilst his journey is brimming in life and vivescent, he is cast off in society alongside others. The first person he encounters demonstrates this: a musician living in a graveyard who found a man randomly eating everything in his kitchen, following by more appearing in his room when he rehearsed forbidden cords.

Ivo is blissful even when thinking of those he knew of who have died, but the world continues around him regardless of his presence, the modern changes to Italy visible in the background as tourists have collected together around the streets in the day, TV aerials are on all the roofs, and washing machines and refrigerators of pure manufactured white are especially everywhere. Against this, the film feels melancholic and eerie, even when Ivo is speaking tenderly of life, realities bleeding into each other especially when it comes to memories of his grandmother, Roberto Benigni playing the role whilst meant to be a child and a young actress is cast as the grandmother.  

The tentative plot is his love for a woman named Aldina (Nadia Ottaviani), as pale with blonde hair as the Moon she will be positioned as later on, trying to return a shoe back to her after an ill advised incident her sister helped with, clutching onto throughout without any true insidious (or unintentionally insidious) aspect to his love for her, almost childlike instead as a crush. The closest thing to another prominent figure, among those displaced like he and seen throughout in reoccurring roles, is a prefect named Gonnella (Paolo Villaggio), shown initially fearing his neighbours will infect him with their old age as an older man himself, made to retire due to his mental health and believe everyone is a spy out to get him, even thinking his own son is a fake pretending to be a son. There is still a light humour, and it is still bawdy, one of the stories is that of the wife whose libido is so strong it lead to an amicable divorce from her husband, who adored the hairdresser's manicurist but could not keep up with someone so passionate the sofa starts steaming up with their embrace and hurdles on literal train lines in one of their many frequent love making rituals. Honestly, where the film was probably dismissed is how gentle it is, following characters and scenarios Ivo encounters without a sense of plot driven melodrama. Considering early in his career Fellini jettisoned plot driven stories for this template which help bring his acclaim, such as with the likes of Amarcord (1973), it does raise the sense Fellini sadly was out of time for cinema in 1990 then the film being flawed in pace or meaning.

The film looks beautiful, Fellini's trademark a baroque maximalism where depicting entire aspects of Italian culture, even its ancient past, were depicted with every detail and every extra having interest to examining them. This was all with a dream logic that explored the "texture" of his worlds whether the internal subconscious of a lead, the environment itself, or both, the gnoccata festival is a good example here. Without the loaded satire of Roma (1972) of the fashion show of priest uniforms covered in neon or riding bicycles on a catwalk, it is still over-the-top in taking the real tradition of a festival based on the food item gnocca, with a crowned gnocca Queen and even mascot costumes of gnocca royalty, done in this case as a loving nod to tradition whilst having a sense of humour.

The film does dangerously get close to Fellini looking at the modern day dismissively whilst lamenting the past, which is righteous when mocking the obsession with fancy new electronic appliances, but with music would veer into closed mindedness of an old man. Thankfully, the sequence when this comes in clearly embraced the spectacle and feels less dismissive, more the lament of everyone charging ahead in the new world without pause for the past from the perspective of those lost from before. That is the discotheque sequence, an awesome scene for Fellini's swansong, of a giant warehouse with towering reflective panelled walls that move on rails, and crowds decked in late eighties fashion. The biggest surprise, which clearly was not a musical licensing issue at all when the film was instead "lost" to lack of interest, is how he managed to get Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel, off the Bad (1987) album, a huge album and one of its singles which also happens to work perfectly for the sequence itself. The scene, where Gonnella laments the music lost in the past, thankfully does not quash the beauty of this moment, actually evoking what David Lynch does in a set piece for Wild at Heart (1990). The irony is not last as, at that Cannes Film Festival where Fellini's film was dismissed it was Lynch, who admired the filmmaker and would even befriend him, who won their most important award the Palme D'Or for that year with Wild At Heart. Both films have scenes juxtaposing wildly alien fans of a different genre of music, in Lynch's a heavy metal concept, suddenly stop and become an audience for an entirely different reality, time stopping for everything as these youths circle around a beautiful slow dance with an older woman who loved Gonnella despite he being so gone in his conspiracy theories, getting to rekindle that love over a classical piece.

And thankfully, Fellini ends his last film, before his 1993 passing, with the satirical touch he streaked his career with, as whilst politics do not necessarily appear in his films, he did prod follies in humanity continually. Two brothers, set up early on wanting to accomplish this, end up literally capturing the Moon herself at one point, and as crowds gather, priests and politicians intermingle on TV, and it is a world changing event of spiritual profoundness. What happens is that this monumental event is to be ruined by bickering, the Moon getting abuse hurled at it for no reason, and a gun being fired spoiling a profound moment. Fellini still loves humanity but gets a humour in humans being distracted by their own pettiness, rather than enjoy the things in life Ivo as many characters before him had throughout the director's other films, a fitting end to a magnificent career.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eerie/Whimsical

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low