Stardust Memories - Review

National Review, Sept 27, 1999 by John Simon

I don't usually write about documentaries, because most of them belong under the rubric of reportage rather than art. To be sure, most feature films, too, fall very far short of art, generally aspiring only to be popular entertainments, and failing even at that. Clearly outclassing the current copycat, featureless feature films, however, is the documentary Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember, by Anna Maria Tato, whose name the press kit misspells Tato, which admittedly is nothing compared with the film's misnaming one of Mastroianni's favorite childhood movies as Flaying Down to Rio. Still, flaying alive might not qualify as excessive punishment for many in today's movie business.

Marcello Mastroianni (1923-1996) was a great film actor. It was not his fault he was dubbed "The Latin Lover," something he inveighs against in I Remember. Rightly so, for in several of his most important films he was not a lover at all: as the teacher-turned-labor-organizer in The Organizer (1963), a naive youth shyly in love in White Nights (1957), a member of a gang of thieves in Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), the caring older brother in Family Diary (1962), the impotent husband in Il Bell' Antonio (1960), the homosexual lusted after by Sophia Loren in A Special Day (1977), and several others. Even as the aging, lame Casanova of Ettore Scola's That Night in Varennes (1982), he is playing merely a human being, and no one in the movies has ever been more human than Mastroianni.

His was a startlingly handsome face that aged gracefully into a rueful palimpsest, where reading between the heavy lines of the present one could still discern the flawless alabaster past. When, as here, the posture has become slightly stooped, the walk somewhat hesitant, the viewer grows aware of his own aging. For we do not notice the tiny incremental stages of our own senescence, but in the sudden, shocking decrepitude of a movie idol we see our own mortality more truthfully than in any mirror. As I Remember moves freely forward, backward, and sideways, we get a fine perspective on Marcello's, our own, and everyone else's lives, and surely 200 minutes is not too long for a seminar on living.

Besides a ballooning wife (pasta, not helium) whom Marcello finally shed, there were well-publicized lovers such as his leading ladies Faye Dunaway and Catherine Deneuve, on whom he fathered the surprisingly unattractive and untalented actress-daughter Chiara. Could his then newly married co- star Brigitte Bardot also have been on the roster? In I Remember, he sings-or croaks-the famous Mozart aria about the number of Don Giovanni's conquests, and even his poor singing is not without charm. Conversely, his dancing, including the tap we see here, was good, except when, as in Fellini's Ginger and Fred, it was meant to be amateurish.

Anna Maria Tato, a filmmaker and Mastroianni's companion for the last 22 years of his life, made this documentary in Portugal, where Marcello, then 73, was in his final movie, Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1996), directed by the 88-year-old Manoel de Oliveira. (Despite his age, Oliveira had "an irritating amount of energy," Mastroianni says. "I felt like his grandfather.") It is a poor film (as I would have expected from that inept director), but Marcello brightens it considerably. Although the questions Tato asked for I Remember were agreed upon beforehand, the answers were neither scripted nor rehearsed: only one camera, and always only one take. The result, with intercut sequences from Marcello's films (some of which were unseen in the U.S.) and a late stage appearance, is spontaneous and enchanting.

This was a man intelligent, witty, modest, honest, and charming to his fingertips-ah well, that was Marcello's only blemish: stubby, unaristocratic fingers. Fellini was well aware of them, as Marcello and he (Fellini makes several brief appearances) duly noted; the director even tried to lengthen them with plastic extensions. In the end, he took them as they were, as he also did what he jokingly called his star's "country- bumpkin face." He would tell his cherished cinematographer, Giuseppe Rotunno, who shot this film too, "Make him handsome! You must make him handsome!"

(Mastroianni took this sort of thing with a humility unknown in today's Hollywood. "He was right when he used to say, 'Make him handsome,' or 'make her beautiful,'" he said of Fellini, "because the actor is a hyphen between the filmmaker and the audience.")

I remember the dinner at Mastroianni's house on the fabled historic Appian Way to which the director Lina Wertmuller took me one evening. The food was delicious, our host delightful. I particularly recall his taking us around his art collection, including several discolored rectangles where paintings used to hang. "This was a Vespignani," Marcello would say with a shamefaced smile, "gone to pay the tax man."

In the movie, too, while musing about the absurdity of American actors turning their profession into something painful and tormented, he observes that this makes sense only if you are in arrears with tax payments or out of work. He compares acting to the cops-and-robbers games of his childhood: "This profession is marvelous. You are paid to play games, and everybody applauds. Of course, you need a little talent. But what more could anyone ask for?"