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Rating: A film that rekindles the love for cinema... and does so by telling the story of theater. Martone restores the sacredness of the vision, now almost at its lowest ebb in these recent times of closed theaters and platforms. He revives that electricity in the air of an audience that is a place of life for the actors, but also for the audience that interacts and dialogues with them and even for all those behind the scenes. That artistic tension cannot be elsewhere, it is there and only there the vital space of the Scarpetta family, of a very young Eduardo De Filippo and also of the wild brother Peppino, children of secret loves only in the daily hypocrisy of the large extended family.
It tells the story of the legal battle between the Neapolitan actor and playwright and the great D'Annunzio, but the energy, the fire that fuels this work lies elsewhere. It lies in the endless games of fiction in life and life in fiction, in the hypnotized gaze of the spectator who eagerly watches what they normally do not see in the theater: everything that happens behind and beside the scenes. And in this, Martone's looks investigate marvelously: they lurk behind the actors, looking towards the audience, lose themselves in the wings where the young Eduardo and Titina have to do their homework, linger long on the gestures and grimaces of a Scarpetta-Servillo who is a tightrope walker, domineering father, genius and jester, a monster with immense sexual and gastronomic appetites, generous uncle to all, and a lonely man.
A cinema of exquisite classic craftsmanship, of actors who know how to act (there is also the namesake descendant of Scarpetta), of perspective games, scenes that merge the overwhelming river of words (the music of the Neapolitan dialect) and the extreme clarity of feelings, doubts, and frustrations. The existential essence of each one is written on the faces of the brilliant actors, in their movements, in their daily posture, as if life was a theater of masks that must obey the author-master Scarpetta. Punctually, his characters attempt to escape the imposed role: the wife Rosa defends the hereditary future of the children (not all entirely "legitimate"), the lover Luisa demands to bring Peppino home, the son Vincenzo constantly dialogues between adherence to his father's rules and attempts to renew them, to embrace new forms like cinematography. The only one who fully embraces that life with unquenchable love and curiosity is the young Eduardo, who in the eyes of Alessandro Manna shows in germ everything that he will become.
Eduardo Scarpetta writes for all of them the parts on stage but also those offstage, in an authorial-erotic fury that subsides only in front of the words of Benedetto Croce. By confirming his innocence in the legal case with D'Annunzio (the play Il figlio di Iorio is a parody of La figlia di Iorio, not a counterfeit), Croce would like to sanction its minor stature as a farce compared to D'Annunzio's drama.
Watching a Martone like this is like feasting at Scarpetta's Lucullian tables: it is a feeling, an euphoria that does not need many plot architectures, like a script where the adhesion between actor and character is such that it does not require a precise script. But the beauty of cinema is the intimate deception, even in this sensation of scenes that make themselves. As with Scarpetta's comedies, the lines are meticulously calibrated in long sleepless nights when the author conceives his children of paper and ringing words. In this sense, the feeling of unbridled popular vitality (even in the luxurious palaces, the family has a breath of common simplicity) this sensation so spontaneous and yet so artfully constructed is the greatest symptom of the diamond-like talent of its author.
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