After a cigarette and a song, Chiara Mastroianni dresses as a man and ‘becomes’ her father Marcello. In front of the mirror she glues on her moustache, puts on her glasses and hat and starts speaking in Italian. Outside Paris it flows under her steps, around her loved ones become restless. There is no French or foreign journalist who has not, sooner or later, asked Chiara Mastroianni to talk to him about her father and mother. And Chiara probably always answered, disguising the inevitability of the question behind humour. But her irony has never protected her from what is evidently her Achilles’ heel. My Marcello try to exorcise that vulnerability, to work on the idea of being ‘daughter of…’.
Not everyone can be the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni. And in that singularity lies the whole question and the whole film by Christophe Honoré who continues his work on the family and on the re-elaboration of the loss of loved ones in a film that gives its narrative a “private” side, a family therapy in which we we discreetly ask what we came to do. Everything is true but nothing is really true in this poignant dysphoria, a poetic essay, joyfully exaggerated and profoundly sincere, on great ordinary pain, where everyone interprets themselves but in a staggered version of reality.
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