Word: mastroiannis
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CULTURE SHOCK comes to the cinema in Dark Eyes, filmed in both the USSR and Italy. Director Nikita Mikhalkov is Russian, while his actors and their dialogue are Italian. Based on several short stories by Anton Chekhov, the film stars that mainstay of Italian cinema, Marcello Mastroianni, as a womanizer (what else?). Russian in outlook but quintessentially Italian in its characterization, Dark Eyes is a unique and almost dizzying blending of the two cultures from which it is drawn...
...film's humorous elements are its greatest attraction. Mastroianni plays a man with a vivid, even clownish imagination, a part at which he is particularly adept. "How could you marry a man like that. He should have been a clown," Romano's mother-in-law says early in the film...
...Mastroianni attained Italian film stardom as the wistful suitor in Visconti's White Nights, and in 1959 Fellini made him an international icon by casting him in La Dolce Vita. Mastroianni compares these two men, who were crucial to his career: "Visconti was the teacher. Severe, but we like him. Fellini is your benchmate, the one you sit next to and make jokes. With Fellini, always we make it a joke. The more serious the film, the more we laugh. We don't say, 'Oh, maestro, how beautiful is this thing you are creating!' We think this...
...joys of creation and camaraderie are essential to Mastroianni's career. "When I make films, I am absolutely happy," he says with a grin. "That's why I make so many films. This is a most beautiful thing, to be with 60, 70 people on a set and to make stories. It helps me to act. I work seriously but never take myself seriously. I want to enjoy myself -- really enjoy -- like a child. Because all actors are children. If it is a limit that an actor is still a child, it is also a miracle. And when the film...
...would call the actor's private life boring, and Mastroianni would not call it private. He has been married to the indulgent Flora for 37 years; their daughter Barbara is 35. But then there is Chiara, his 15-year-old daughter by Actress Catherine Deneuve. Ask him about his limitations, and you get the shrug. "Perhaps I don't be so faithful," he says. "Actors make promises, and they don't keep promises. This infantile nature follows us. Whoever lives with an actor has to accept that he needs to live a little in his fantasies...