You laugh. “You Laugh” is the Taviani brothers’ second appeal to the prose of L. Pirandello after Chaos. In an effort to achieve the conciseness necessary when working with the material of this format, the directors cross a certain line and fully reveal the idea of only one of the three stories used, the adaptation of the other two remains at the level of the sketch. This disproportionate dramatic structure is strongly dissonant with the consistency of the general intonation, elegantly balancing between mystery and absurd humor.
The mystery of what is happening in the first part is emphasized by camera work with chiaroscuro, complex travelling, as if gnawing into space, panning among the objects of Romanesque architecture (the beginning of the picture can generally be compared with the experiments of the maestro of visual suspense D. Argento), some absurdity, even the stupidity of the main character - a kind of symbiosis of the heroes of Kafka and Beckett.
The music of N. Piovani, who has been collaborating with the Taviani brothers for many years and feels well the peculiarities of their directorial plans, successfully complements the atmosphere of existential absurdity in the first novel. The symbolic motif of laughter without cause in cloudy life situations acquires sinister features, becoming a transparent allusion to the existence of modern man in the conditions of postmodern carnival.
The second novel is perceived as an unfinished sketch of the history of the father-son relationship, the specifics of which are vague, almost not marked, perceived as an unsuccessful bridge between the first and third segments. The final story is solved in the aesthetics of the folk legend familiar to Taviani, carefully recreating the peculiarities of peasant life and elevating everyday details to the level of poetic allegory, however, the spark of lyricism is carved only in the episode where the old man tells about Galilee, and the narrative becomes mythological. In the rest, the advantage of this part again becomes the visual side - charming rural landscapes radiate pantheistic pacification.
In short, in Taviani’s tape, as before in “Good Morning Babylon” and in the critically praised “Host Father”, there is an imbalance between the highly artistic video sequence that forms a single whole with the soundtrack and the weak, unexpressive dramaturgy that tries to compensate for its semantic scarcity and superficiality with poetic symbols that are often introduced into the narrative artificially, burdening the plot. "You're Laughing" is a good example of the mistakes made by neglecting the integrity of the film's structure, because no style tricks can make up for it, because the form should enrich the content, provide mechanisms for its correct perception, and not replace it with itself.