The grand Italian
writer-director Federico Fellini is inarguably one of the most important
filmmakers in the history of cinema. In
a near 40 year spanning career, the director has won everything from the
coveted Palme d’Or for his 1960 masterwork La
Dolce Vita to four Academy Award wins for Best Foreign Language Film for La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, 8½,
and Amarcord. Already a master in his own time, the Italian
maestro’s mixture of the fantastical, bawdy, whimsical and often carnivalesque influenced
everyone from Terry Gilliam, Emir Kusturica and even David Lynch. Often life affirming and visually
overwhelming with boundless, typically anecdotal information coming at the
viewer from all sides, Fellini is in a class all his own and remains one of
cinema’s most formidable giants to learn from and respect.
All of this makes the
reception to his final swan song The
Voice of the Moon all the more baffling for how swiftly critics, audiences
and distributors turned on the maestro.
Based upon Ermanno Cavazzoni’s novel The
Lunatics’ Poem and starring Life is
Beautiful actor/comedian Roberto Benigni, the film is something of a smorgasbord
of recurring obsessions and themes to be found throughout all of Fellini’s
films. Concerning an off the wall poet
recently released from a mental institution, the film is a fleeting and
Saroyanesque serenade through the wonderment and whimsies of the Emilia-Romagna
countryside of the director’s upbringing.
Much like Akira Kurosawa’s Madadayo,
The Voice of the Moon plays less like
a conventional narrative than an open farewell to a life sitting in the
director’s chair.
Unlike the aforementioned
film however, The Voice of the Moon also
feels oddly dated and indicative of the auteur coming across as both yearning
for nostalgia and a bit like an old man having a go at youth. Take for instance a sequence where our hero
wanders into an abandoned warehouse where some kind of disco dance party with
patrons dressed like the ones in the music video for Michael Jackson’s Beat It.
As it continues, the disc jockey just so happens to be blasting Jackson’s
The Way You Make Me Feel and the coup
de grace involves Gonnella (Paolo Villaggio) dancing a waltz as the young punks
stop to form a circle and watch. It’s
the kind of fantasy Fellini would dream of to separate himself from the pack
and as such it comes across as somewhat dismissive.
After screening the film at
the Cannes Film Festival, The Voice of
the Moon was both critically panned and tragically left without a
distribution deal in the US and UK for many years until the good folks at Arrow
Video proceeded to serve up a digitally remastered blu-ray edition. Now that it’s available, I’m glad to have
seen it but tend to agree with critics his final effort is far more
self-indulgent and personal than his previous works. Where his earlier works did overload the viewer with sensual delights and increasingly hallucinatory magical imagery, there was somehow something holding them together whereas The Voice of the Moon plays a bit like a series of disconnected vignettes which never coalesce.
Personally my favorite
Fellini where he gets everything right remains The Temptation of Dr. Antonio from the anthological film Boccaccio ’70 which united the director
with Mario Monicelli, Luchnino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica. Though only a short segment the narrative
hook synchronized beautifully with Fellini’s interests, passion for life and
bawdy penchant for women with curves. Here, The Voice of the Moon finds
the director in familiar territory but lacking the drive that made Dr. Antonio so wildly entertaining. In summation, this is strictly for Fellini
die-hards only, offering up a wealth of whimsy and fantastical imagery but
ultimately paling in comparison to what the man did before.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki