There’s a scene, in I’m laughing herewhich is worth more than many biographies. Eduardo Scarpetta walks through his house-theatre like an absolute sovereign: comedians, children, lovers, prompters, musicians, servants. Everything revolves around him. Yet, in that noisy and very lively courtyard, we can already glimpse the crack that will change Italian theatre. Because behind the triumph of the great Neapolitan comedian, three children are growing up destined to surpass him: Titina, Eduardo and Peppino De Filippo, unrecognized children of the relationship with Luisa De Filippo.
Mario Martone’s film chooses a specific moment in Scarpetta’s life: the famous legal case brought by Gabriele D’Annunzio after the parody of Iorio’s daughter. An affair that set newspapers on fire at the beginning of the twentieth century and divided the Italian cultural world. Scarpetta had dared to transform D’Annunzio’s drama into farce, convinced that popular theater should be able to desecrate everything. D’Annunzio reacted by taking him to court for plagiarism.
That trial was not just a clash between two gigantic personalities. It was the symbol of an Italy suspended between high culture and popular culture, between literary aristocracy and the stage of the people. Scarpetta won the case, but came away exhausted. And it was precisely from that fracture that the decline of his theatrical reign slowly began.
Meanwhile, almost silently, another story was growing. The one told in The true story of the De Filippo brothersthe film that a few weeks ago brought the human story of the three illegitimate brothers forced to live in their father’s shadow back to the fore. Eduardo, Peppino and Titina learned theater behind the scenes, breathing in its misery and greatness. For years they bore a surname that was not theirs, marked by that ambiguous condition which in the Naples of the time weighed like a social condemnation.
And this is perhaps the most powerful aspect of Qui rido io: while it recounts Scarpetta’s glory, it allows us to glimpse the silent pain of the children destined to take up his legacy by radically transforming it. Eduardo De Filippo he will take his father’s farcical comedy and bring it into the wounds of the human soul, into poor homes, into marital silences, into the dignity of the vanquished. Theater will no longer be just escape: it will become civil conscience.
What makes the film even more evocative is the presence of Eduardo Scarpetta, great-grandson of the great playwright, who plays Vincenzo Scarpetta. In an interview with Famiglia Cristiana, the actor spoke about the weight and pride of that family legacy: “I didn’t want to have shortcuts for the name I bear and I worked my way up.” And remembering the stories handed down in the family he explained how Vincenzo had grown up «in his father’s shadow», forced to impersonate the famous mask of Felice Sciosciammocca while instead dreaming of cinema.
Something emerges in his words that also runs through Martone’s film: talent, in the great Neapolitan artistic families, is often accompanied by conflicts, rivalries, the desire for emancipation. No one truly lives free from the shadow of their fathers.
And that’s perhaps why Here I laugh is not just a film about theatre. It is a story about failed fatherhood, about ambition, about the hunger for recognition. Eduardo Scarpetta appears both magnificent and fragile: a man capable of reinventing Neapolitan comic theatre, but completely incapable of understanding the human destiny of his children who grew up on the fringes of its glory.
When the audience on Sunday evening will see again that Naples teeming with actors, carriages and dressing rooms, and will then be able to read the film also as the prologue of the true epic of the De Filippos. Because while Scarpetta’s reign falters under the blows of D’Annunzio’s trial, modern Italian theater is already being born.
Sunday 10 May will also be the opportunity to see the film again on television: Qui rido io will be broadcast on Rai 5 in prime time, at 9.20pm.
