With here I laugh Mario Martone faced a crucial period in Italian history, the years called in Europe of the Belle Epoque, obviously that of the triumphant bourgeoisie which unfortunately closed with the First World War and the advent of several dictatorships, and which in Italy bore the name of the most enduring of the presidents of the council, Giovanni Giolitti. Naples also enjoyed it, and saw the first affirmation of a new and aggressive post-Bourbon and post-Risorgimento bourgeoisie. These are the years, among other things, in Naples, of the great journalism of Matilde Serao and Edoardo Scarfoglio, of the triumph of the dialect song, the best song ever had by our country, whose strength lasted until the seventies. Years were also the last of great importance in the history of the show in Naples, and of which one can hear the echo in Here I laugh and faces of them are found and voices are heard, because the original musical commentary of the film is made up of songs, without there being a concordance between their era and their themes with the events narrated in the film.
In the field of culture, the belle era Neapolitan had many names, besides Serao and Scarfoglio: Salvatore Di Giacomo and Roberto Bracco and Ernesto Murolo, and Ferdinando Russo of Bourbon nostalgia, and Francesco Mastriani of appendix novels, and the young Benedetto Croce of whom the film also speaks and which shows when he intervenes in the trial brought by D’Annunzio to Eduardo Scarpetta for his parody of theDaughter of Jorio. Which was the parody of an extreme aestheticism: another face of the bourgeoisie and the most protected and exalted one, with little relationship with the “social” and with a closer relationship with the dream of an aestheticizing and idealizing culture, very different from the one that laughed at the theater with Eduardo Scarpetta.
Sensing the changing times best of all, Scarpetta had abandoned Antonio Petito and his Pulcinella (he had trained with Petito, and had witnessed the great mime’s physical death in the theater, on the stage) to look at the pochade French (la Belle Epoque par excellence) and to invent a character who still had some traits of Pulcinella, but who abandoned the plebs for the growing bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, a smart and bourgeois young dandy, Felice (or Feliciello) Sciosciammocca. It is significant, I believe, that Luchino Visconti and Suso Cecchi D’Amico had thought for a long time about a film about Petito for Totò to interpret and which unfortunately was not done (and first to a Marchese del Grillo for Aldo Fabrizi, who would certainly have been different from that of Monicelli, Zapponi and Sordi). And that the comedian Scarpetta took part in some silent film at the time, with appearances in part recoverable.
Looking at Paris
It is significant that the comedy most represented by Scarpetta among those written by him stealing the scripts in Paris was’In the santarella, from the French Ma’mselle Nitouche set to music by Hervé. Scarpetta’s was in fact a translation and even a plagiarism or an adaptation, like his other works. The Neapolitan bourgeoisie and Scarpetta together with her looked to Paris. The small villa in the hills that Scarpetta had built and on whose facade he wanted the inscription “Qui rido io” to be engraved, was built with the proceeds of that play alone.
Scarpetta was therefore a very skilled innovator in the course of time and history; he was the spokesperson for a novelty which was also the one of which D’Annunzio was spokesperson. He too looked to Paris but to that of the great salons, renouncing any plebeian mood and aspiring to the sublime … It was a confrontation, the juridical one on Scarpett’s “plagiarism” of Daughter of Jorio, between a bourgeois soul that denied its origins and one that instead continued to feed on them and claim them. The part of Martone’s film that concerns the D’Annunzio-Scarpetta trial is among the most instructive in the film. It has some didactic, and rightly so. But the film, in addition to the famous trial, focuses on two other strong cornerstones: the theater, the family.
Theater is very present in the film, rightly so, and Toni Servillo is a more than convincing Scarpetta (like Maria Nazionale and all the other actors), putting something of his own into it, moving away from imitation. Perhaps Martone should have stylized the theater he shows more, giving it more distance, but the choice of a sort of fusion between stage and audience was too attractive for an author who was trained in Naples and that the Neapolitan theater has, with love, studied. Perhaps he should also have looked at the examples of the television “Scarpettiana” and even at the trilogy of Totò and Mattoli (Misery and nobility, The Neapolitan Turk, The mad doctor, all “in color”, even if Totò had already made a Scarpetta in black and white, Seven hours of trouble, adapted from ‘Na criatura lost). In short, the theater is one of the three elements that make up the film, leaving aside but not too much the musical commentary, together with the process and, dominant and necessarily in the first place, the family.
The paschal family
It is here, narrating this abnormal family, that Martone gives his best, helped in all evidence by the screenwriter Ippolita Di Majo, exploring and unraveling the tangle of a multiple and bizarre nucleus, with Scarpetta father of many children from several women (not enemies among themselves), from pasha of other times, and by binding all his children to the world of theater, also to use it and not only to give them a profession, a future. The future of the his theater. Martone is also an assiduous theater director, in the world of our show, and it is in the family theater, “Edwardian” par excellence, that here excels, with beautiful and full scenes, unforgettable especially those of shared lunches, with “wives”, children and other actors. The meal, food as a unit, as a culture, like Naples …
Maybe – we are insatiable! – a more insistent historical background would have benefited the Martonian reconstruction, considering that the Belle Epoque ended with a world war and was a prelude to fascism, to an era with which the world of theater should have come to terms, as happened for example to the three most famous of Scarpetta’s children, Titina, Eduardo and Peppino De Filippo (the latter author of a book of cruel memoirs on his strange family) and their greatest rival and their father, Raffaele Viviani. Martone knew how to do it very well in We believed, a “historical” film in all respects and one of the very few dedicated by cinema to our Risorgimento, and in Fabulous young man on Leopardi, while here it seems a little neglected. There is a brief moment in the film, in which a tired Scarpetta walks in the night down an alley, which may suggest a similar but more insistent and crucial scene than the Leopard Visconti: the melancholy of a dying world, and no one knows what will come next. But not everything changes because nothing changes, and the three De Filippo, perhaps more brilliant than their father and whose image closes the film, had to take this into account.
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