Of
Marcello Veneziani
07 April 2024
Marcello, ah Marcello. One hundred years after his birth, twenty-eight after his death, Marcello Mastroianni remains in the collective imagination, and in its clichés, the true representation of the Italian: handsome, serious, talkative, Latin lover and sex symbol, with a voice a little nasal, unmistakable but without particular features. All the great actors of Italian comedy were basically comedians, “ridiculous”, they had at least a caricatural and grotesque side that made them public favorites: Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Monica Vitti, Ugo Tognazzi, Walter Chiari, up to Giancarlo Giannini and Paolo Villaggio, not to mention the previous generation, that of Totò, Vittorio de Sica, Peppino de Filippo and Aldo Fabrizi.
Mastroianni, on the other hand, was the only one of the most famous who didn’t want to make people laugh, a brilliant but not comical actor, his figure never overflowed from the role assigned in the film. Mastroianni remained inside the story and his part. The tone of his voice was flexible, he adapted to the allegro andante of the comedy but he also knew how to penetrate the dreamy and mysterious voice of some Fellini films, dreamlike and melancholic; and in the tragic roles of some films, such as Todo Modo or Ghost of Love.
His female version with whom he was usually paired in the film saga was Sophia Loren. They were the primordial couple of Italian cinema, the Adam and Eve of our identity. Brilliant couple but not always used in brilliant roles; think of A particular day by Ettore Scola. However, unlike Loren, who turns ninety this year, Mastroianni never received an Oscar, even though she came close several times.
Mastroianni was the Italian actor par excellence; symbolic actor, or as they say today, “iconic”; due to his restrained vocation for brilliant and arch-Italian comedy he was later also used in more serious and less home-made films such as Sosviene Pereira, Oci Ciornie or the Pirandellian The Two Lives of Mattia Pascal. And he also acted a lot abroad. Even in Italian comedy Mastroianni was a national actor, in the sense that he was not only from Rome or Lazio; he was also Sicilian, Neapolitan or generically provincial.
Also for this reason Mastroianni appeared as the ideal type of actor, without particular virtues and virtuosity, like the prodigious Sordi or the showman Gassman. He was the Fellini actor par excellence, but he didn’t identify with Fellini’s cinema, he was also something else. And he didn’t even identify with the role of the lover and the seducer, because he also played the opposite of him, as in Vitaliano Brancati’s Bell’Antonio, which became the paradigm of the impotent in those years. Or like the homosexual in A Particular Day.
As a boy I was haunted by that “Marcello come here” that Anita Ekberg addressed to Marcello Mastroianni in La dolce vita in the iconic bath in the Trevi fountain, inviting him to enter the legendary Bernini pool. That cry was for me an initiation into adult life, after having been Marcellin bread and wine in my childhood years, the protagonist of another famous Catholic and childish saga. Then he became a bit of a nuisance.
Mastroianni represented the autobiography of the nation above all because in La dolce vita, he landed as a provincial in search of fortune in the pleasure-filled and slightly melancholic Rome of the economic boom. And in that story of a provincial who landed in Rome we recognized the author who wrote the film, Ennio Flaiano from Pescara; the director who made it, Federico Fellini from Rimini; and also the protagonist of the same name, the Ciociaro Marcello Mastroianni. Three provincials to conquer the capital. But on that journey from the province to the metropolis a large segment of Italians could be recognized, especially from central and southern Italy, who had landed in the ministerial-clerical Rome or in the dreamy Rome of Cinecittà.
Unlike the other great Italian actors, Mastroianni had the opportunity to make a farewell film at the end of his life, edited by his last partner, Annamaria Tatò, I remember, yes I remember.
Mastroianni never represented committed and ideologically aligned cinema, but he did not shy away from some roles forced by the political spirit of the time. It is impressive to see it lined up, with all the great directors and actors of Italian cinema on the guard of honor at the death of Enrico Berlinguer in 1984. Almost the entire platoon of Italian cinema was there, of the great directors only Luchino Visconti, who died a few years ago, was missing first but aristocratic and decadent communist; Federico Fellini was not even missing, although he had never been close to the PCI and the militant left; and this says a lot about the cultural hegemony in Italian cinema and the power of intimidation or pressure that he exercised, with the related invitation to conform. It couldn’t be missed, and Mastroianni naturally didn’t miss it.
Mastroianni had completed modest studies and no academy, in the war he had made do and survived, he kept out of public life and civil commitment. He had famous love affairs and greater international notoriety than the other protagonists of Italian comedy, perhaps more adored at home, but less exportable abroad. Despite the reputation of being lazy and ultimately reluctant, Mastroianni was a prolific, flexible actor and never went against the grain. He died in Paris where he had been living for years but his face remained the most famous face of that Italy of our childhood, of our youth, and in any case the one from which we come.
(Panorama n.15)
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