This picture ought to begin with the disclaimers “For Cinephiles Only.” Although casual movie watchers with a limited sense of history, people who haven’t got subscriptions to the Criterion Channel, and folks who’ve never laid eyes on Rome’s Trevi Fountain are, admittedly, not likely to even become aware of this movie’s existence in the first place, so no harm, no foul. Nevertheless, “Marcello Mio,” written and directed by French filmmaker Cristophe Honoré, and starring Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, and a host of other European artistic luminaries, is a cinema in-joke elongated beyond all reason. But by the same token, it is a passion project, one with a pedigree of sorts; Honoré and Mastroianni embarked on this movie after having already collaborated on a half-dozen films.
Chiara plays herself, as does most of the other cast. We first see her in a sleeveless black dress and blonde wig, romping in the aforementioned Trevi Fountain, recreating a scene from Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” in which Anita Ekberg, whom she’s impersonating here, co-starred with Ciara’s dad, the icon Marcello Mastroianni. A little later, out of costume in a hotel room with her mother, Deneuve, Chiara looks in the mirror and sees a CGI image of her father looking back at her. “Can’t you see it? I have dad’s face,” Chiara says to her mother, who responds noncommittally but with affection.
Soon after that, on a film set, she takes direction from Nicole Garcia, who says of her work in a scene, “I’d prefer you play it more Mastroianni than Deneuve.” A little later, a colleague observes, quoting Nietzsche, “Everything good in life is inherited.” Not helpful, colleague. In Polanski’s “The Tenant,” the title character Trelkovsky went mad because her fellow apartment dwellers were, in his estimation, trying to turn him into the prior tenant, Simone Choule. Here, Chiara decides to roll with folks trying to turn her into Marcello. She starts dressing like her dad, wearing a wig with his hairstyle, applying a mustache.
Her dad’s identity becomes a crutch (actor Melvil Poupad calls her out on that)—or a rut in which she can luxuriate; whatever you call it, beyond her guise’s ability to provoke, it’s a means for Ciara to avoid her actual self. She starts talking as if she’s him, too. Regarding Marcello’s inability to fully embrace monogamy, she notes, “That’s what Faye couldn’t understand.” “Faye?” asks her companion. “Faye Dunaway,” she responds, the actress being one of Marcello’s more storied loves.
Before this journey of identification is over, Mastroianni will appear on an Italian talk show in full Marcello drag and sing a song to a shaggy dog on a stool while another Italian screen icon, Stefania Sandrelli, looks on indulgently. If you know about Italian talk shows this won’t seem too weird…but it’s still a little weird. But not weird enough to rescue the film from the longueurs that often attend a vanity project, which is what this picture is whether it was Honoré or Mastroianni who initiated it.
And yet, in the movie’s final minutes, Deneuve, eventually joined by her daughter, sings a song of mourning to Marcello, and this moving conclusion finds a grace that the movie, prior to it, has often flailed in seeking.