Word: mastroianni
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What a gift and a burden, to be Marcello Mastroianni. Though none of his 150 or so films were made in Hollywood, he is the consummate movie star: charming, at ease in his celebrity, with the light, self-deprecating tilt to his wit that royalty wears so well. The face wears well too. At 63 it has settled into a comfortable handsomeness. Today Mastroianni is exhausted from too many interviews on this Manhattan visit to promote his film Dark Eyes. But like a Casanova tantalized by the inevitability of one more conquest, he will of course accommodate another visitor...
...that there has been only one Marcello to play. In his first eminence, as the cynical journalist in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and the indecisive director in Fellini's 8 1/2, Mastroianni might have been typed as an existentialist heartthrob, a Valentino for the atomic age. But by the early '60s he was also playing a comic-pathetic roue in Divorce, Italian Style; a quiet-spoken syndicalist in The Organizer; a trio of Italian males in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. From these disparate parts emerged the full image of Mastroianni: a sensual, reasonable man, agreeably passive, remarkably resilient...
That was, and remains, the Mastroianni character. But Mastroianni the artist is more complex, a creator of delicious surprises and subtle tonal shifts. Romano, the ebullient loser he plays in Nikita Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes, is a virtual anthology of Marcello males, and the actor finds vibrant life in each of them. In his rich wife's mansion Romano is the buffoon philanderer, tiptoeing toward domestic calamity. At the spa he is the exuberant courtier, wading into a mud bath to retrieve a woman's hat. On business in Russia he is the dapper salesman, mainly of himself. And years...
Running endless engaging variations on this character has given the actor a "nice, comfortable career in cinema." It has also teased audiences into believing the Marcello males are transparent masks for Mastroianni the man. The actor will oblige this pretense. "Basically," he says in a melodic baritone slightly rasped by his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, "there is always yourself. On yourself you build. First the foundation, then the floors. So what I try to do is to offer myself undressed, without any covering. And in a naive way, as if it was the first time. Forget that...
...need to get his point that TV is vulgar and coarsening. More moving is his presentation of two carefully imagined archetypes of aging. Masina's Amelia is a woman grown more emotionally compact with the years, defending herself against their onslaught with a sort of neat, perky reserve. Mastroianni's Pippo represents the opposite extreme, vulnerable dishevelment. She wins sympathy by asking no favors; he gains it by begging for it. These are lovely performances, observant, original and infinitely appealing. When we, and Fellini, are lucky, his taste for flash and trash does not overwhelm what he really...