- Fabio Esposito
- Toni Servillo as Alberto in Inner Voices
Eduardo de Filippo’s Inner Voices (Le voci di dentro) starts out looking like a farce. But in the sharp, spare, perfect production directed by Toni Servillo—who also stars—the jokes are gradually overtaken by a darkness that feels an awful lot like tragedy.
Alberto Saporito is an aging Italian everyman who runs a hand-to-mouth rental business with his brother, Carlo, and lives in a building where everybody knows everybody else and all the doors are left open. One day Alberto accuses his neighbors, the Cimmarutas, of murdering his pal Aniello, who’s disappeared. Alberto claims to have seen some damning documents; he knows where the body is buried, he says, and where the Cimmarutas stashed Aniello’s bloody clothes. But when the evidence fails to materialize, Alberto considers the possibility that what he thought was a murder was really just a particularly vivid dream.