Director Christophe Honoré and the actress are reunited again in the official selection of the 77th edition of the festival. They offer us a nostalgic and poetic comedy, and a fabulous tribute to Marcello Mastroianni and to the 7th art in general.
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How to continue living with the death of a loved one? How to bring missing people back to life? How can we not forget the faces that fade? So many existential questions that filmmaker Christophe Honoré has been exploring in his work for over twenty years. Of the Love songs in 2007, in High school student in 2022 via In Paris in 2006 and more recently at the theater in The Sky of Nantes, Christophe Honore never stops summoning the ghosts of the past. The film hits theaters Wednesday May 21. With Marcello Mio, presented this year in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, the director once again probes the subject of filiation and mourning. But this time, he takes on a cinema monster: Marcello Mastroianni.
To play the actor who died in 1996, he naturally asked his daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, to play her own role. And the question will arise again with a cinematic dimension. How can we bring back the memory of a being who haunts our lives as much as the film? To support him in this quest for identity, the director surrounds him with an intimate and family cast. Catherine Deneuve, Benjamin Biolay, Melvil Poupaud, Fabrice Luchini, Nicole Garcia, all in their own roles, enter more or less joyfully into this dreamlike farce.
It all starts with a shoot that turns into a nightmare. Under the cries of an excited director, Chiara Mastroianni is ordered to replay the scene of the Dolce Vita in a fountain in Paris. A legendary sequence that she knows well, since in the original film directed by Fellini in 1960, it is his father, Marcello, who plays the title role alongside Anita Ekeberg. Dressed in a blonde wig and a never-ending dress, Chiara Mastroianni becomes aware of the absurdity of the scene. A casting followed with Fabrice Luchini for Nicole Garcia’s film. At the end of the tests, the director tells him: “In this scene, I would like you to be less Deneuve than Mastroianni!” An injunction which will resonate in a singular way in the actress’s unconscious. Short hair, men’s glasses, hat, mustache, Chiara will slip into Marcello’s costume with delight. And it works ! Because the resemblance is striking.
Faced with this surprising transition, those close to them will each react in different ways. Believing in a passing fad, her mother, Catherine Deneuve, and her former companion, Benjamin Biolay, surround her with tenderness and kindness. “She needs her father.” explains his mother. “You miss your father”, tries to interpret Benjamin Biolay. But others, on the contrary, do not spare it. Starting with Nicole Garcia: “What is this joke again!”, she gets annoyed. As for his teenage sweetheart, Melvil Poupaud, it is anger that wins. There remains an unexpected character who rushes with joy into this new horizon, Fabrice Luchini who will finally be able to become Marcello Mastroianni’s friend.
In this new opus, Christophe Honoré invites, once again, extinct souls. He adds poetry and humor. Chiara transformed into Marcello elegantly traverses the memories (real or fantasized) of her childhood.
During her memory trip, she meets impromptu people. An English soldier ready to jump from a Paris bridge, a dog looking for companionship, a fragile kitten. Her wanderings take her to the rooftops of the capital, to the old family apartment, and then to Rome. The charm of this melancholic comedy is mainly due to the luminous interpretation of Chiara Mastroianni.
Like a tightrope walker who walks on the wire of a heritage that is sometimes too heavy, the actress rushes headlong into the twists and turns of a myth that she tries to touch. Far from a nostalgic fresco, Marcello Mio also makes us laugh, in particular thanks to the replies of Catherine Deneuve who in a few words deconstructs the image of the legend.
Fiction or documentary, Christophe Honoré mixes the true and the false, bringing a cinematic monument to life. Despite some sequences that are too long, he manages to engage Marcello Mastroianni’s lovers.
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Gender : Comedy
Director: Christophe Honore
Scenario : Christophe Honore
With : Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Nicole Garcia, Fabrice Luchini, Melvil Poupaud, Benjamin Biolay, Hugh Skinner
Country : France
Duration : 2:01
Exit : May 21, 2024
Synopsis: It’s the story of a woman called Chiara. She is an actress, she is the daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve and, for one summer, disrupted in her own life, she tells herself that she should rather live her father’s life.