Marcello Mio, probably the first movie to appear in Cannes competition with the word “nepo baby” in its script, is part of an increasing tendency to not just work with signifiers and quotations curated out of popular film history, but that attempts to directly address the way any director, actor, and film can’t help but accrue a debt to the past — by virtue of simply existing. In this case, director Christophe Honoré’s autofictional conceit concerns Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, playing, along with the rest of the cast, a version of herself.
Her career is stuck in neutral: a pathetic photoshoot at Trevi Fountain that repurposes its iconic presence in La Dolce Vita is followed by another indignity — a director wants her to audition. (She says, later, that Léa Seydoux probably already has the part if she merely wishes it.) Wallowing in defeat at the apartment of her ex-husband and pop duet partner Benjamin Biolay, she attempts to disappear. If her public life feels borrowed from her famous parents, what difference does it make if she borrows one of Biolay’s suits, a pair of shoes, and gets one of her craftsperson friends to make her a wig, and so become the very likeness of her father?
Mastroianni’s performance subtly conveys a light kind of elation: this is less a new transformation, and more the feeling of unnecessary weight being shorn away. Everything that suggested the forward advance of time (and the influence of Deneuve, who shares the screen with Chiara in several scenes) is denied. She begins to walk around Paris as if it’s the set of Visconti’s White Nights.
Honoré can always be counted on for his excellent taste in music, and for pointing some quasi-realistic light at famous actors. But not for knowing how to handle plot. The intrigue of the film is found in how Chiara’s identity — as a transition and as a tradition — works as screen presence; but the mechanics of a fling with a British serviceman, a useful stranger, or meetings with Deneuve and others who know Chiara (and deny the reality of this change) unnaturally force forward momentum into a film that exists most comfortably in a state of limbo.
Chiara’s face, seen under the shadow of a hat brim or in the unflattering flat light of a TV studio, isn’t framed as merely androgynous; Honoré is surely aware that his film evokes the beginning steps of a transition narrative. (Ex-boyfriend Melvil Poupaud cameos just long enough to throw a T-slur Chiara’s way.) “My face doesn’t match the way I feel on the inside,” Chiara says, and she insists this isn’t a method acting try-out — that she’s gaining a form of knowledge, not losing her mind or breaking from reality. Yet Honoré is content to keep both gender and film history at an intellectualized remove: Chiara does not become Marcello fully, nor someone new. The film lurches toward a false realization — her choices will amount to a temporary test of reality that concludes following the ordeals of a game show and a police arrest.
There is something unsettling about Marcello Mio, along with films that similarly look out at the vast evening sky of iconographic stars and films and pluck a handful to stir in an imitative solution — an approach more common in genre film, but that is clearly just as available to the arthouse drama. A film like this could require a small retrospective’s worth of annotations; from its first draft it stood a decent chance at getting into Cannes, a selection for mere association if nothing else. But the actors playing themselves never get to fully address the film’s nagging question: of whether an awareness of film history consigns contemporary art to a karaoke of past successes.
Chiara and the rest of the cast seem game for this thorny question of history and how to poetically misremember it, but Honoré shrinks from his own challenge. He ends on the classic metonymy of a deep plunge into water as a means of rebirth. The world that awaits Chiara on the shore is an unappealing mix of roles, responsibilities, and yesterday’s ideas, so the camera temporarily puts them out of frame. It’s very neat, and suggestive, and retreats from the questions the film is ultimately content to dabble in. If this washes away an episode, a performance, for her, it shrinks the film’s ability to mean anything in a greater scheme, limiting Marcello Mio to the daydreamed wanderings of those with the luxury to feel creatively blocked by the rich possibilities of their cultural inheritance.
DIRECTOR: Christophe Honoré; CAST: Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Fabrice Luchini, Nicole Garcia; DISTRIBUTOR: Strand Releasing; IN THEATERS: January 31; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 1 min.
Published as part of January 2025 Review Roundup
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