Latin loner

Remembering Mastroianni

by Chris Fujiwara

MARCELLO MASTROIANNI: I REMEMBER, Directed and written by Anna Maria Tatò. With Marcello Mastroianni. At the Brattle Theatre October 22 through 28.

Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember (Marcello Mastroianni: mi ricordo sí, io mi ricordo) isn't so much a documentary about the life of the star as a one-man show in which he

plays himself. Directed and edited by Anna Maria Tatò, his companion of 22 years, and photographed in warm tones by Giuseppe Rotunno, the film has a roundness, grace, and visual authority far above the usual level of talking-head studies of the famous. And it has Mastroianni, one of the icons of the '60s, proving himself a fascinating storyteller, a marvelous actor, an utterly charming person, and a subtle commentator on his life, times, and art.

"I have no great qualities, so I'll talk about my small defects and petty weaknesses." His self-depreciation is part of the self-image he has perfected -- which is not to say that it's a pretense. As he points out during the film, he frequently chose roles that would allow him to separate himself from the "Latin lover" stereotype that rewarded his success in Fellini's La dolce vita. But surely Mastroianni knew that by seeming not to take himself seriously as a seducer, he enhanced his seductiveness. His anecdote about using dialogue from La dolce vita to try to pick up Anne Bancroft at the Actors Studio implies that he took seriously the art of taking himself not seriously.

His actor's life is a flight from reality: "It's as if I'd lived between parentheses, waiting for real life afterward. But I'm not exaggerating when I say that perhaps it never comes along." The cinema for him is both a museum and a series of adventures. He recalls traveling 17,000 kilometers around Greece shooting a Theo Angelopoulos film. He's far from weary, but it's apparent that nothing radically new can happen to him. He has his loves (Naples, which he calls "a unique, intelligent city") and hates (television); he has some convictions. Above all, he has memories -- memories that define him, that he returns to, that he has polished and preserved. Throughout the film, Mastroianni is a funny, expansive raconteur, never more so than when remembering an erotic encounter with an unseen, unknown woman aboard a train traveling in darkness (to avoid air raids), or describing his first meeting with Fellini about La dolce vita.

Lovers of Italian cinema must without fail see this film. The wealth of clips from Mastroianni movies constitutes a tantalizing anthological history of post-war Italian cinema, covering such great but little-regarded directors as Mario Monicelli (Padri e figli, The Organizer), Ettore Scola (Drama of Jealousy, A Special Day), and Elio Petri (Todo Modo). Vittorio de Sica is represented by clips from his big successes with Mastroianni and Sophia Loren (Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow and Marriage -- Italian Style) and one of his biggest flops (A Place for Lovers, with Mastroianni and Faye Dunaway).

Some of the most interesting scenes in the film involve Mastroianni's work with Fellini. In a pseudo-documentary apparently filmed during the shooting of 8-1/2, Mastroianni, playing a version of himself not dissimilar to his director character in the Fellini film, fields inane questions from journalists. Even more remarkable is a bizarre fake screen test for Fellini's aborted Viaggio di Mastorno, in which Mastroianni, wearing a fake moustache and scraping a cello, is bewildered and irritated by the confusion of the shoot and not helped by Fellini's direction ("The important thing is to express a sense of loss because the instrument represents pre-congenial awareness"). Wondering aloud to Fellini why it's so hard to make his character come alive, Mastroianni concludes, "The problem is, I don't feel that you trust me."

At 72, he is still handsome; Tatò filmed I Remember during the production of Manoel de Oliveira's Voyage to the Beginning of the World, which would be Mas-troianni's last movie. A memorable scene has Mastroianni sitting in a courtyard next to a small wooden table with a pitcher and a glass on it; in the background, a tree casts soft shadows against a white house. It could be a shot from a movie of a Chekhov play; in fact, it showcases a speech from Uncle Vanya, which Mastroianni gives delicately, intimately, and without preliminaries, so that you can believe the character's environmentalism is also the actor's.

Originally shown in 1997 in a 100-minute version, I Remember is now making the rounds in a version approximately twice that length. Thanks to Tatò's sensitive pacing, the film easily sustains its running time -- which the richness of Mastroianni's career and reflections would, by themselves, be enough to justify.