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Rating: Never was an ending so prescient and wise: “If there was a bit of silence, if everyone made a bit of silence, perhaps we could understand something” says Paolo Villaggio, a caricature of himself forever, at the film's closing.
A film, “The Voice of the Moon” (1990) by Federico Fellini that, let's be honest, he could have easily avoided. Based on the novel “The Lunatics' Poem” by Ermanno Cavazzoni, which is decidedly much better than the film (read it twice in 3 months!!), this cinematic "testament" of the Rimini master turns out to be an unresolved, chaotic work and one of the weakest in his entire career.
A film, intended to be visionary and dreamlike, about the disintegration of contemporary society and the confusion of languages in a circus of misunderstandings where the characters spin aimlessly searching for a permanent center of gravity without ever finding it.
It tells the quirky stories of a dreamy and somewhat Pierrot-like Benigni who embodies "the childlike soul" and then there's the aimless wandering of Villaggio/Gonnella representing the distrustful and grumpy adult in perpetual battle with the world and suspicious of everything and everyone (the two souls of the director? The double soul of each one of us? two fakes of the director?).
In short, all the basics were there to create an awkward story with a hint of soul and instead... the director unravels. He loses the boundaries of the story and gets carried away with lengthiness, unnecessary scenes, poorly executed and tedious watercolor scenes (the rooftop escape) not to mention the enormous script holes that, in fact, never existed (it's said that Fellini improvised dialogues, scenes, and camera movements on the spot, like a painter on his palette!), putting together a really long-winded, incongruous story in many parts and frankly boring and filled with rhetoric (the scene of the captured moon, the indictment of commercials… stuff more than clichéd and already widely covered in other far more successful films).
For heaven's sake. You could ask the Grand Master almost anything... even to make a film more poetic than narrative, and in fact, if you don't get sidetracked by the fact that this is not a proper film, but a more or less cobbled-together collection of dreamlike and poetic fragments, on a slender narrative structure, most often nonexistent... well, if you forget all that, the "film" has here and there unforgettable and truly imaginative visions, as if born from the mind of a pure soul, almost an innocent child rather than the then-over-sixty director naturalized Roman.
How can we not remember the scene of the waltz of Villaggio/Gonnella at the disco (…beautiful yes but looong like hunger) or the monologue by Benigni in front of the well in the opening scene asking himself like a pre-litteram simil-Pinocchio “Where do the dead go? Where do the sparks of the fire go? And the music, when it goes out, where does it go?”
In short, a film with a completely dissolved and scattered structure that at times really makes you angry also for that in many ways absurd choice to redub every dialogue with really embarrassing and annoying out-of-sync moments.
A film entirely dispensable from the monumental works of the National Federico. Is it a coincidence that after this half flop no producer would ever trust him again? And that, taken by discouragement, he would close himself more and more until the arrival of death three years later?
Well… perhaps he was all this Great Genius (and God alone knows how much I loved “La Strada”, “8½”, “Amarcord”, “City of Women”, “And the Ship Sails On” to name just my favorites…) but for me, this half slip right at the end of his work he could have well avoided. I only save the poster drawn by the great Milo Manara and little else. Rather... get yourself Cavazzoni's novel: that is truly worth it!
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