Cannes Review: ‘Marcello Mio’ is a Slight but Heartfelt Tribute to Chiara Mastroianni
The Cannes Film Festival is always a hub for exciting new films, and this year is no exception.
Christophe Honoré’s ‘Marcello Mio’ is a slight but heartfelt tribute to Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni. The film plays as a knowing wink to those in the know, presupposing a certain degree of tabloid awareness in order to endear.
“You don’t have to know that Chiara Mastroianni counts Melvil Poupaud and Benjamin Biolay among her past relationships, or that the actress has been a career-long muse for director Christophe Honoré, but God help the viewer that goes in unaware.”
Throughout the film, Mastroianni plays herself, or at least a version thereof concocted for this film. The same goes for old flames Poupaud and Biolay, for mama Deneuve, and for French cinema’s most garrulous nudnik Fabrice Luchini, among others.
Chiara Mastroianni shines in ‘Marcello Mio’, a film that is as much about her as it is about her famous parents.
The main character resembles her performer in every way but one: While Mastroianni can count on Honoré for bespoke roles, poor Chiara still has to go out and audition. And so she does, reading with Luchini for a part in Nicole Garcia’s latest, adultery-flavored project. Chiara does well in the read, but the director (guess who plays her) wants something less sultry and more spry.
“More Mastroianni than Deneuve,” Garcia says.
Here is this burden carried by all second-generation stars, especially those who bear so many of their parents’ features. As a working performer, Chiara isn’t just weighed against other actors of her cohort but against the careers and iconographies of two cinema giants – one departed, living on as an image and myth, and one very much present, living on in her daughter’s living room, where she offers sympathy devoid of understanding.
Catherine Deneuve, Chiara’s mother, is a cinema giant in her own right.
Feeling indignant and invisible, Chiara binds her chest and dons a familiar drag. If the moviemakers want her father, then Marcello she will be. And if the lovelorn British soldier (played by Hugh Skinner of ‘Fleabag’) that Chiara hopes to attract prefers the company of men, then here is a new role for Marcello to play. Chiara bears an uncanny physical resemblance to her father even outside of drag, and she cuts a startling image made-up and in costume, so perhaps the disguise addresses a more personal need, common across all genders, professions, and walks of life: The need to see a departed love one smile back at you once more.
Marcello Mastroianni, Chiara’s father, is a cinema legend.
If Honoré lays out possible threads of grief, denial, desire, or rebellion, he never pulls at any of them, preferring instead to follow a narrative path of least resistance that finds Chiara losing herself in make-believe, refusing to answer to anything but ‘Marcello.’ Friends and family respond with requisite concern, and if they can ever stop squabbling amongst themselves they might just help Chiara get her groove back.
Chiara Mastroianni shines as her father Marcello in ‘Marcello Mio’
Only, rather than honoring the lead, this backfired valentine does Chiara a disservice by flattening her to one-dimension, framing her as an only-child of world cinema so rarified that her experience can have no thematic resonance or be applicable to anyone else.
‘Marcello Mio’ is a Fellini-esque episode of ‘Call My Agent!’
Frankly, Honoré is so monomaniacally focused on Chiara’s unique position that he whiffs on possibilities he himself tees up. Rarer still than looking at a Cannes poster and seeing a parent is looking at the poster and seeing yourself, but the film only pays lip service to Catherine’s experience of fame with a throwaway line.
“People are so nice,” the mama marvels. “People are so nice to Catherine Deneuve,” Chiara replies.
All dressed up with nowhere to go, ‘Marcello Mio’ uses the lead as a prop for nostalgia and stand-in for this or that Fellini homage. When it runs out of Parisian landmarks to mine the narrative up and moves to Rome, welcoming a new set of cameos when Chiara turns up as a Marcello imposter on a daytime talk show. One need hardly strain to see the reference to Fellini’s ‘Ginger and Fred,’ though one can reasonably wonder what it’s all for. Honoré gives a half-tepid answer, imagining this break from identity as part of a movie star burnout, nothing too serious and nothing that can’t be resolved by a delegation of French Cinema All-Stars to the Rescue.
‘Marcello Mio’ plays easily enough, offering a fantasy getaway premised on accessibility in lieu of escape.
It’s a hangout film, an Easter egg hunt for a crowd that won’t bend down too far. Honoré sets an extra spot at the table and invites you to join, pretending for a stretch that cinema is nothing but a family affair.
