Arte - Mastroianni The Ideal Italian (2015)

With 150 films in half a century, Marcello Mastroianni embodies a certain golden age of world cinema. Wry smile, relaxed elegance, this 'monstre sacre' is much more than the incarnation of the Italian playboy he invented another way of being a star, without making waves, disenchanted. Trained by Visconti and became an emblematic actor in the heyday of Cinecitta, he rose to fame with Fellini's “La dolce vita” and knew how to impose his unique, chic and casual style. Marcello Mastroianni grew up in a modest environment and lived a sad youth, marred by fascism. He learned the trade in the theater by interpreting ten years the great authors, under the direction of Visconti. Next to it, the dramas that the cinema then offers him seem like a piece of cake. But with the good years of Cinecitta after the war, a new genre appears caustic comedies which pinpoint with delight the birth of the Italian petty bourgeoisie and bring out a generation of actors. Among them, Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni. According to Alessandro Gassman, both embody an aspect of the Italian soul. If the first, his father, enjoyed playing the “swagger”, the second personified a “welcoming and sunny kindness”. Then, a film, La dolce vita by Fellini, propelled Marcello Mastroianni to the pantheon of international stars. Standing in the Trevi fountain, he imposes a unique style, chic and casual at the same time. The nice boy has become a charmer, an image that he will seek in vain to break by playing the buffoons, the cuckolds, the helpless or the losers, but which corresponds to what he is in life. However, despite the conquests and love at first sight - for Faye Dunaway, then Catherine Deneuve - this fickle husband still refused to divorce his wife Flora. Emmanuelle Nobecourt's documentary retraces the life, the many loves and the prolific career of the actor. Film also explores a seduction that he always skilfully denied, and endeavors to decipher what makes him the quintessence of the Italian. Many film extracts and archive images, sometimes comical, punctuate the story, such as the talk show where Sophia Loren titillates Marcello Mastroianni on his Latin lover side. Testimonies from collaborators, actors (Marina Vlady, Sandrine Bonnaire, Jean Sorel…) and relatives - in particular a touching interview with his eldest daughter Barbara - draw the moving portrait of a “conspicuously normal” man, delicate and warm, fleeing loneliness - he preferred to pace the set and joke with the technicians than to hide in his dressing room. Through the many interviews he gave in his career, the film gives voice to the actor himself, in a fictional and reinvented autobiography. It is Marcello who tells us about Mastroianni, an icon whom everyone continued to affectionately call “Marcello”.

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