“I tell the story of a denied paternity” – time.news

by time news
from Valerio Cappelli, sent to Venice

In “Here I laugh” Toni Servillo plays Eduardo Scarpetta, patriarch of the theatrical dynasty who never recognized his sons Eduardo, Peppino and Titina

«Aren’t you happy that you receive a prince’s lunch every day?» Asks Luisa to little De Filippo in Here I laugh (competing at the Mostra and from Wednesday in 280 copies in cinemas). It is the film about Eduardo Scarpetta by Mario Martone, with Toni Servillo at his best: «I saw Scarpetta as an animal that traces the contours of a limit within which to hunt. Its prey are women, the theater, Naples. A fresco that shows us how much life there is in the theater and how much theater there is in life ». Scarpetta had children by his wife Rosa (Maria Nazionale), his wife’s half-sister and his niece Luisa De Filippo (Cristiana Dell’Anna), the daughter of a modest couple of coal traders. Atypical women, they had something virile that disrupted conformity, they respected each other and were wary of each other, rivals, they knew “pain and pride.” Eduardo Scarpetta was the king of the box office in theatrical Naples of the early 1900s; people took off their hats when he passed. “I killed Pulcinella,” he said. Here comes the legendary scene where the actors pounce on spaghetti: Misery and nobility, the comedy about a desperate, comic and astonished humanity, consecrated by Totò and Eduardo De Filippo, one of the three illegitimate children (excluded from the inheritance), with Titina and Peppino, which Scarpetta had from Luisa, tailor of the Scarpetta theater company . De Filippo (the actor is Alessandro Manna) even as a child had that arched and sly eyebrow that was already a play of the theater, where you would find cracks, contradictions and jeers of the South.

Martone, who was Scarpetta?

«An amoral patriarch driven by the hunger for redemption and revenge, a primordial, almost mythological figure and energy. Toni says it well, he does his job celebrating life, where births and debuts, enthusiasm and depression for risks, envy and admiration coincide. There is a mystery in him that had to be faced ».

“This is the phrase that stands out on the façade of the neo-Gothic style villa, at Vomero, that Scarpetta had built with the proceeds of a single play, In Santarella, which gave the building its name ».

See D’Annunzio and Benedetto Croce.

“Croce defended Scarpetta in the first historic copyright lawsuit, after the parody (which caused an uproar) on Iorio’s daughter, the tragedy of D’Annunzio, who dragged Scarpetta to court. Wealth and fame were no longer enough for him, he sought the challenge with the greatest poet of his time. Croce’s thesis was: it is not plagiarism, just a bad comedy, which does not constitute a crime. Except that Croce’s defense marked not the decline but a crack in Scarpetta. Everything seemed to shatter for him, he challenged fate in the classroom with a great actor’s number, his last great performance ».

The theater for Scarpetta …

«It was his life and his whole family nucleus gravitates around the theater. In the cast the lead actress is Iaia Forte and there is also another Eduardo, Scarpetta’s great-grandson: he plays Vincenzo, the son of his wife ».

Eduardo called his father Scarpetta “uncle”. He gave him food, a roof, a love for the theater. She gave him the name but not the surname.

“Throughout his life De Filippo never wanted to speak of Scarpetta as a father but only as a playwright. Shortly before his death, his writer friend Luigi Compagnone asked him, have we grown old, is it time to talk about it, was Scarpetta a strict father or a bad father? The answer was: he was a great actor ».

You, in the fourth consecutive film in competition in Venice, return to the theme of denied paternity.

«Which is at the center of Eduardo De Filippo’s theater. Think about how he must have felt when he wrote Filumena Marturano, the three children who must be recognized. His brother Peppino had been abandoned with his nurse in the countryside in the first five years of his life. He hated his father Scarpetta. ‘

Your first time at the Mostra?

“As a boy as a spectator. I didn’t have a penny and had to choose whether to go to movies or eat. I solved with icicles ».

She and Toni Servillo: for Paolo Sorrentino he is an older brother …

“Well, we met when I was 17, we had cousin and rival theater companies, him in Caserta and I in Naples. He had “‘na capa” of hair like that “, and he did a rock show, on sound bases, with a rhythmic use of the body, something unimaginable. We went to see together in the suburbs ‘the scarfalietto of Scarpetta, the audience laughed so much that they didn’t understand half of the things that the actors, Luca De Filippo with his company, said. In my debut, Death of a Neapolitan mathematician, we came here to the exhibition. We started this job together, forty years ago ».

In this film he brings theater back to cinema.

«I thought of it as a theatrical text. The wings are indistinguishable from the curtains in her apartment. Here is the imaginary novel by Eduardo Scarpetta and his tribe ».

September 7, 2021 (change September 7, 2021 | 17:29)

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