The Film: 3/5

The film made by one of the most beloved, eccentric, and humane visionaries of world cinema – the venerable Federico Fellini – is finally available on Blu-ray after more than quarter-century of only being accessible to the legendary filmmaker’s more fervid followers as The Voice of the Moon (La Voce Della Luna) makes its high-definition debut from Arrow Video in the form of a dual format edition as part of their Arrow Academy line.

Equally astounding and confounding, The Voice of the Moon is a work of magical realism that finds Fellini exploring thematic ground previously tread in far better films. The entire feature feels like the director wanted to say something along the lines of “and one more thing” before he shuffled off this mortal coil. There was not much in Moon that his devoted fans hadn’t seen before when first their eyes gazed upon Voice, but the production marked a return to comfortable territory for Fellini in the twilight of both his life and career. Three years after the film was screened out of competition to a mostly negative reception at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, the man who brought the world such timeless masterpieces of the silver screen as La Dolce Vita, Amarcord, and Fellini Satyricon passed away.

The film stars the famed Italian comic actor and filmmaker Roberto Benigni (Life is Beautiful), an ideal lead actor for a Fellini flight of fancy, as Ivo Salvini, a recently released mental institution patient who ventures aimlessly throughout the Emilio-Romagna countryside encountering strange characters and struggling to make sense of a world he no longer recognizes and is in fact slowly slipping into capitalist decadence. He is accompanied in his quest by Gonnella (Paolo Villaggio), a once-respected citizen of the town who is losing his grip on reality. From afar Ivo is infatuated with lovely local woman Aldina (Nadia Ottaviani), but she wants absolutely nothing to do with him.

What little plot there is to be found in The Voice of the Moon, which Fellini loosely adapted with his longtime writing partner Tullio Pinelli (La Strada) and Ermanno Cavazzoni from Cavazzoni’s 1987 novel The Lunatics’ Poem (Il poema dei lunatici), is merely a set-up for an episodic series of surreal adventures Ivo and Gonnella embark upon in order to make sense of the madness that is overtaking their town. They encounter a beauty pageant held to crown “Miss Flour of 1989” and a rave being held inside a warehouse in the middle of nowhere where the partygoers dance mindlessly to Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel” and Gonnella futilely attempts to introduce classier dancing to the disinterested youth.

The story culminates in the cultural, political, and religious hysteria that erupts when three brothers manage to literally capture the moon and bring it down to Earth with farming equipment. The moon plays a central role in the story as Ivo believes that Aldina is its living representation and it tries to communicate with us through the water but only when all is quiet and we’re listening with intent.

Exuberantly filmed in Technicolor by Tonino Delli Colli, one of the all-time great Italian cinematographers with a resume that includes past collaborations with Sergio Leone (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West), Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties), and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salo, The Gospel According to St. Matthew), The Voice of the Moon found Federico Fellini attempting to recapture some of the spirit and imagination that had resulted in his earlier masterpieces but had supposedly evaporated gradually during the 1980’s. It is not an easy film to watch - that two-hour run time can really test the patience and the nerves despite the best efforts of editor Nino Baragli (Caligula, Once Upon a Time in America) – and sometimes its ideas seem half-formed and realized, but Fellini must have figured that if he threw enough themes and images against the narrative then something was bound to stick.

Benigni is well-cast as Ivo as the character is evocative of roles he played in the past, such as the Italian tourist Bob in Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law. Fellini needed an actor who could easily convince as someone wandering through life with a sense of bemusement and fascination with that which is usually beyond his scope of comprehension, and Benigni proved more than perfect for the task. Prior to Fellini’s death in 1993, Benigni expressed an interest in having him direct his live-action adaptation of Pinocchio, which would have been a collaboration suited to the filmmaker’s unique gifts behind the camera. Nearly a decade later, Benigni directed the movie himself and starred in the title role. It was received well in Italy, but in America it became a laughing stock among critics due to the atrocious English dub commissioned by distributor Miramax and Benigni being way too old to play a wooden puppet who desires to be a real boy.

Best known for playing the character Fantozzi in a popular series of films in his native Italy, Paolo Villagio cleverly embodies the aching sadness and world-weary cynicism of the social pariah Gonnella. His scenes with Benigni allow both actors to be each other’s straight men and sidekicks with relative ease. Fellini loved commanding crowds of people in celebration of life, love, food, and tacky pageantry as he demonstrated in several of the film’s more memorable vignettes. Production design by Dante Ferretti, who would later work on some of Martin Scorsese’s best modern films, gives the town a lived-in authenticity and finds strange beauty in Fellini’s various sets and locations.

Audio/Video: 4/5

For its Region A Blu-ray premiere, The Voice of the Moon is presented by Arrow Video in a new 1080p high-definition transfer sourced from a 2K resolution scan and restoration of the film’s original 35mm camera negative and framed in the correct 1.66:1 widescreen aspect ratio. The extensive restoration results in a lush and pleasing image whose strongest assets are colors as bold as Fellini ever employed, improved depth and definition that really brings out the detail and texture in the film’s sets and locations, and a low and consistent level of grain crucial to preserve the filmic appearance. Skin tones are authentic, and the higher resolution reveals additional character in the faces of the director’s cast.

The uncompressed Italian 1.0 mono audio track was remastered from the original sound track negatives. As pointed out in Arrow’s customary collector’s booklet, since the audio was recorded in post-production, synchronization at times doesn’t come close to matching the lip movements of the performers. Fellini was known to have his actors intentionally say random things instead of what was in the script and then instruct the dubbing performers to not perfectly sync their recorded dialogue, to best create a sense of unreality in his films. It’s not a spacious and immersive soundtrack, but it gets the job done. Every component of the mix dovetails nicely with any of them being drowned out by unbalanced volume levels, also ensuring that distortion and any other potential issues never crop up. English subtitles have also been provided. 

Extras: 3/5

“Towards the Moon with Fellini” (58 minutes) is a vintage documentary filmed during the production of The Voice of the Moon that contains interviews with the filmmaker and his cast and crew (in Italian with burned-in English subtitles) and much behind-the-scenes footage. It’s a very heartfelt and fascinating documentary of Fellini and collaborators hard at work trying to make his last great work of cinema. Taken from a well-preserved videotape source element, “Towards the Moon” is presented in 1.33:1 full frame with a 2.0 PCM mono soundtrack.

In the “Felliniana Archive Gallery”, we are treated to over fifty production stills, promotional materials, and more pertaining to The Voice of the Moon. This feature was made possible by Don Young, a Fort Worth-based collector and admirer of Fellini who began his collection over two decades ago with the purchase of a single poster in San Francisco. Check out Young’s website at www.felliniana.com for more information.

This dual format edition also comes with a Region 1 DVD copy, reversible cover art, and a collector’s booklet featuring a new essay about the film by critic and broadcaster Pasquale Iannone and notes about the restoration.

Overall: 3/5

The Voice of the Moon may be minor league Federico Fellini, but even when he wasn’t firing on all cylinders creatively, the influential filmmaker was still capable of generating joy and wonder for the natural beauties of the world that we tend to take for granted. It was a fine film to close out a career in cinema that will live on as legend, and Arrow Video’s Blu-ray release does it just right with a gorgeous new HD transfer and a few quality supplements.