La Presse at the 77th Cannes Film Festival | The girl from the myth

(Cannes) Marcello Mastroianni would have been 100 years old this year. French filmmaker Christophe Honoré (Well love, The high school student) pays him a fanciful tribute through his daughter Chiara in Marcello Miopresented in competition at Cannes on Wednesday.

Marcello Mio is not a biopic. It’s an ode to all cinema actors, but first and foremost it’s a film about being the daughter of one of the most legendary couples in cinema: that of Catherine Deneuve and by Marcello Mastroianni.

The two-hour feature film begins with a scene that evokes both The American night by Truffaut and The good life by Fellini. A breathless director directs a Chiara Mastroianni “disguised” as Anita Ekberg, who wonders why she agreed to find herself in a black dress in a fountain.

She can no longer bear being reduced to the status of “the daughter of”. When she auditioned a few days later for a film by Nicole Garcia, opposite Fabrice Luchini, the actress and filmmaker told her that she would prefer to see more of Mastroianni in her performance than of Deneuve.

So Chiara takes her word for it. She steals a suit from her ex-husband Benjamin Biolay, wears a hat and Persol sunglasses, puts on a thin mustache, and there she is who thinks she is her father, to the point of demanding from others that they call him by his first name and speak Italian to him.

It seems very unlikely and, of course, it is, it’s quite ambiguous and undoubtedly unhealthy – as her friend Melvil Poupaud points out – but it’s Chiara’s way of finding meaning. to his life: to live that of his father. “I’m afraid of being unmasked and discovering that I’m nobody,” she told Biolay.

In this very particular film, as Ettore Scola would say, the actors play their own roles in offbeat versions of themselves. I once attended a Nicole Garcia shoot in Paris, and she was far from being this authoritarian and indelicate director. Luchini plays Luchini, Jouvet’s disciple, with the exuberance we know him to be.

Catherine Deneuve also seems to lend herself to the game with pleasure, and it is for her that Christophe Honoré reserved the funniest and scathing lines. She has by turns an imperial detachment, protective love and exasperation in her voice in each of her conversations with her daughter.

Honoré directs Catherine Deneuve for the second time, while this is his seventh film with Chiara Mastroianni since love songs (2007), also presented in competition at Cannes, as Please, love and run fast (2018).

Marcello Mastroianni was twice winner of the Best Actor Prize at Cannes, for Drama of jealousy by Ettore Scola in 1970 and Black eyes by Nikita Mikhalkov in 1987. He was also named a finalist for the Academy Award for Best Actor three times.

“How long has it been since you were asked to do a casting?” », asks his mother Chiara, who knows the answer. When they return to visit the Parisian apartment of her childhood (the neighbor downstairs was Maria Callas) and the current owner kindly opens the door to them, Chiara remarks that people “are always nice to Catherine Deneuve”.

It is in the interactions between mother and daughter that Marcello Mio is the most successful (the film will be distributed in Quebec by AZ Films). As in several films by Christophe Honoré, the actresses perform songs by Alex Beaupain, but it is neither a musical nor a frank comedy, even if in its last part, shot in Rome and at the Wed, the film turns into an Italian comedy.

We get somewhat lost in the breaks in tone. Some characters seem to believe that Chiara is the true reincarnation of Marcello, while others question his sanity. The viewer no longer knows very well which foot to dance on as the fanciful mise en abyme, the games of truth and falsehood, and Chiara’s real search for meaning overlap and seem incompatible.

What remains is the evocation of one of the greatest myths of the seventh art. Enough to satisfy many moviegoers.

The hosting costs for this report were paid by the Cannes Film Festival, which had no say over it.