Title: The King of Laughter (Qui rido io)
Director: Mario Martone
Language: Neapolitan dialect, Italian
Running time: 133'
We all know that cinema takes great inspiration from the theatre, and that it did so especially in its first years of life. Martone’s The King of Laughter (Qui rido io) highlights the resemblances between the two even more, in a movie more about Italian comedian and playwright Eduardo Scarpetta’s family tree than the first lawsuit about copyright in Italy. We get lost between all the characters, more fascinated by the grandeur of the production than by the story itself.
It’s the Naples of the beginning of the 20th Century, and Eduardo Scarpetta’s (Toni Servillo) Felice Sciosciammocca has taken the place of the typical Neapolitan mask Pulcinella. Everyone loves him, and he’s the greatest playwright and theater actor of its time. His life and that of his family gravitates around him and his theater, nothing else matters other than what he says or does. Behind the scenes, his family is quite complicated, as we get lost among his legitimate and illegitimate children, among which we can find Peppino (Salvatore Battista), Titina (Marzia Onorato) and Eduardo (Alessandro Manna) De Filippo, children he had with his wife’s niece Luisa De Filippo (Cristiana dell’Anna). At the height of his career, Scarpetta decides he wants to make a parody of D’Annunzio’s “The Daughter of Iorio,” but on the first night, all hell breaks loose in the theatre and D’Annunzio actually ends up suing Scarpetta for plagiarism. The lawsuit will last for years and affect the precarious equilibrium in his family as well. In the final scene at the trial, Scarpetta will be able to convince the judge with a great actorial performance and finally claim his play as rightful parody.
When recounting the plot of the movie, it seems like the lawsuit should be the focus of the story and the situation of the enlarged Scarpetta family just a background in which it all develops. However, when watching the movie, we feel like it’s quite the opposite. We get really lost between all the characters and children and affairs Scarpetta had, and in the scenes where the whole family is present, it’s really hard to keep track of who is who. The lawsuit becomes just the background in which all the family drama takes place. While watching the movie, we really get also distracted by the magnificence of the sets and costumes, that really resemble those of the Belle Époque in which our story takes place. Other than the grandeur of the production, we feel like we are watching a movie about the art of theatre, about the subtle line that separates satire and parody from plagiarism. Sometimes, even the actors seem to be acting for the stage rather than for the camera, and these techniques don’t always work in favour of the movie. However, the movie seems to be making fun of itself at times, in an attempt to resemble Scarpetta’s own theatre genre and central theme of the movie: parody.
In the end, the movie seems like a really heavy one. It’s long, there are too many characters to keep track of, and the fact that the most if it is spoken in Neapolitan dialect doesn’t really help all the audiences (not even the Italian ones), who have also to always keep an eye on the subtitles. The King of Laughter seems to be doing two different things at once: a biopic on the great Eduardo Scarpetta, and a retelling of the first lawsuit about copyright in Italy, but somehow gets a little lost on both aspects. The movie is a really long one too, and requires quite the attention of the spectator to really make sense. Another aspect that highlights the connection of cinema to theatre.
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