The Voice of the Moon

Newly released from a mental hospital, Ivo Salvini fixates on Aldina Ferruzzi and sets out to seduce her. He frames her blond beauty as the moon, a symbol he believes holds the source of his madness. The town begins to watch as his obsession shades into a surreal, uneasy pursuit.

Ivo crosses paths with a chorus of madcap locals, including an oboist who sleeps in the cemetery and a man meditating on rooftops. These encounters deepen the film's off-kilter mood and hint at the networks of eccentric characters around Ivo. The surreal atmosphere grows as his pursuit continues.

Gonnella, the ex-prefect fired for rising paranoia, teams up with Ivo as his reluctant ally. Together they begin to probe the town’s ‘wild conspiracies’ that float around them. Their partnership anchors the narrative in a tension between sanity and farce.

In a farcical beauty pageant, Aldina is crowned Miss Flour of 1989, a moment that amplifies the feverish mood of the town. The event becomes a focal point for vanity and spectacle. Aldina's surreptitious shoe fitting with multiple candidates adds a Cinderella-like twist to the scene.

After the pageant, Aldina ends up lost in the farmlands, wandering among graceful African women chanting in the moonlight. The sequence blends ritual and dream, heightening the moon metaphor that haunts Ivo. It marks a turning point as the ordinary world tilts toward the surreal.

Inside an abandoned warehouse, the film reveals an Inferno-like disco of fashion victims dancing to Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel. The club becomes a counterpoint to the pageant and the moon plot, a surreal eruption of pop-culture delirium. The gathering underscores the town's destabilized reality.

During the revelry, Gonnella orchestrates a waltz for the crowd but is thrown out after smashing the DJ’s cache of records. The act epitomizes the collapse of order amid the night's chaos. It highlights the tenuous control characters try to exert over a world gone strange.

The three Micheluzzi brothers capture the moon using gigantic farming equipment and rope it down in a stable. The celestial symbol is turned into a domestic, almost bureaucratic spectacle. The stable becomes a bizarre stage for this surreal achievement.

Priests and politicians convert the moon-capture into a propaganda conference announced to the assembled public. The sacred moment is repurposed for political messaging, revealing the manipulation of spectacle. The town shifts from wonder to political theater.

The conference degenerates into chaos as a madman fires a pistol and screams, 'What am I doing here? Why was I put here in the first place?' The eruption shatters any sense of unity and exposes the town’s collective fragility. Ivo Salvini is left amid the disruption, pondering the meaning of it all.

With the mayhem fading but meaning unresolved, Ivo Salvini delivers the film’s last line: 'If we all quieted down a little, maybe we'd understand something.' The line reframes the moon-obsessed frenzy as a plea for quiet reflection rather than triumph. The ending lingers on the film's lingering mystery.