Marcello Mio is a bit of an unusual entry in this year’s Cannes selection. On the one hand, it’s clearly there as a legacy inclusion and as reflection of the committee’s lower bar when it comes to French films. Yet it’s also one of the more experimental films, treading a fine line between fiction, documentary and self-parody. It’s written and directed by Christopher Honore but surely conceived in large part by Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. In an attempt to come to terms with her legacy, Chiara decides to “become” her late father – dressing like him, talking like him, and recreating iconic scenes from his films, with the help of director Nicole Garcia and actor Fabrice Luchini, both of whom play themselves. At times it’s more like performance art than anything else, a record of a “happening” or “event” in which Chiara sees how far she can live and interact as Marcello.
On the surface that sounds pretty gimmicky and there’s no doubt that it is at times. But there are also some really powerful moments here. There’s something profoundly moving, for example, about the recreation of the Trevi Fountain scene from La Dolce Vita. This is one of the few scenes in which Chiara doesn’t play her father but another actor, Anita Ekberg. In stark contrast to the glamour of the Fellini original, the recreation is awkward and ungainly. Hair plastered to her face, the wind whipping up her scarf, Chiara shivers in the cold, light years away from the lush mise-en-scenes she is trying to invoke. Something about cinematic language itself seems to have been denuded here, turning this prologue into an elegy for film.
From there, Chiara does seem to be genuinely looking for a way to come to terms with her father’s legacy: “It’s a while he’s been with me, haunting me – actually, it’s like I’m his ghost.” At first, she responds by retreating into herself, withdrawing from the world with a Garbo-esque moodiness as she wears sunglasses outside, takes long walks at night, and on the whole prefers her own company. As that might suggest, Marcello Mio works best when it’s a mood piece, somewhat formless, a free-floating meditation on the past. Deneuve herself puts it best when Chiara is just starting to sink into this restless wandering: “Tell yourself she’s like a sleepwalker – don’t wake her suddenly.” Insofar as the film has an artistic signature, it revolves around tableaux that capture the abstract yet inexorable flow of time moving on: tai chi lessons in the Luxembourg Gardens, a motorbike ride through Rome and above all Chiara’s nightly walks through Paris. Here, Honore truly taps into the ghosts of the various New Waves, while adding a few magical realist touches of his own, most memorably in sequence in which Chiara follows a stray dog down to the Seine and forms a connection with a soldier waiting for his boyfriend on the Pont Neuf. Later, Deneuve will recollect that Marcello also used to come across stray dogs on the streets of Paris – or, rather, that they were all drawn to him.
Marcello Mio is also memorable when it leans more into documentary, and Chiara is just content to reflect on her father’s legacy. At these moments her relationship with Deneuve starts to approach the intimacy we see between Chantal Akerman and her mother in No Home Movie. In one poignant Wild Strawberries-like scene, Chiara returns to the apartment her mother shared with Marcello, where Deneuve reflects that “Time erases everything, you know…things vanish with us when we leave…and like things we’ll end up buried.” Chiara responds by inviting her mother to lie down on the floor and put her ear to the wood – “Can you hear Callas?” – as the blunt materiality of the world comes up against the immateriality of cinema, a particularly moving scene if you see it, as I did, in an empty cinema. This is the existential core of Marcello Mio, the anxiety that “the films won’t make them remember us.”
Of course, a fair amount of Marcello Mio is devoted to Chiara’s performance of her father and she is quite magnetic in this role, especially during the first act. It’s quite remarkable how much she looks like Mastroianni – even Deneuve exclaims that “the likeness is uncanny” – and there are some great sequences in which she recreates his iconic moments. As Deneuve states, however, the effect is uncanny rather than seamless, since one of the core, perhaps the core, element of Marcello is missing; namely, the ineffably masculine gaze that made him such a perfect cipher for Fellini’s own voracious vision. As Deneuve also puts it, “you have his expressions but you don’t have his face,” and that slippage between facial appearance and facial expressions makes Marcello Mio genuinely mercurial when Chiara is fully in character.
Unfortunately, for all these strengths, Marcello Mio doesn’t have quite enough to sustain a feature-length film, and descends into a fairly trite media picaresque in its third ac, when Chiara appears on an Italian television program, with a lineup of different Marcellos, each dressed in the style of a particular film (she gets Ginger and Fred). She then has to prove she’s Marcello by making a dog sing, as he once did on television, before the other fake Marcellos chase her out of the station. As twee as this climactic sequence is, however, it immediately gives way to a gorgeously burnished neorealistic tableau – Chiara walking down an empty road, in the golden evening light, apartments on the horizon, surrounded by all the exurban desuetude of Rossellini as she drinks from a rusty tap and gives a mangy stray cat some food.
This sequence marks a return to the haptic and fluid tableaux of time passing that crowd the first act, and which gradually start to constellate around water, whether it is Chiara ice skating with her younger self, playing a volleyball game on a beach, or returning to the Trevi Fountain, where she eludes the police by retreating behind its curtain of water, collapsing herself fully into Mastroianni’s screen image, obscured and hypermediated all at once. The film ends with Deneuve singing an achingly plaintive song – “Tell me Marcello, why do you laugh? You’ve vanished, who knows where?” – before Chiara joins her. Their voices shift from diegesis to soundtrack, they finish the song, and they head down to the beach, where they undress and join the rest of the cast in the ocean. It’s a beautiful ending to an interesting and inconsistent experiment, one that gains even more pathos from imaging Mastroianni himself watching it.