Year: 2024

Runtime: 120 minutes

Written and directed by: Christophe Honoré

Starring: Hugh Skinner, Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, Nicole Garcia, Fabrice Luchini, Benjamin Biolay, Melvil Poupaud

By Sarah Manvel

If you ever wanted to see Harry from “Fleabag,” I mean Hugh Skinner, play beach volleyball with Catherine Deneuve, then “Marcello Mio” is for you. But that’s not even in the top ten of the weirdest things that happen in this highly unusual Europudding about one woman’s attempts to escape the enormous shadow of her world-famous parents. The concept is audacious, the plot is ludicrous and everyone involved with the exception of Mr Skinner is playing a version of themselves, but in spite of this self-indulgent silliness the movie works on its own merits. Miracles can and do happen.

Chiara Mastroianni, playing herself, is a jobbing actress in Paris, trying to gear herself up for an audition for a movie by director Nicole Garcia (playing herself) in which she would play the new lover of a character played by Fabrice Luchini (also playing himself, and in the film as in real life her former stepfather, which nobody dwells on too much so let’s not either). Her mother Catherine (Ms Deneuve, playing herself) gives unhelpful advice and the audition goes so badly Nicole asks Chiara to play closer to the style of her father, Marcello Mastroianni, instead. This comment causes something to shift in Chiara’s head. She goes to hang out with her ex-husband, the French singer Benjamin Biolay (playing himself), and while snooping through his flat borrows one of his suits and dresses up as her dad. Somehow dressing up as Marcello makes Chiara feel better than anything else has in a very long time. Trying out this feeling on a late walk, Chiara-as-Marcello encounters an emotional British soldier named Colin (Mr Skinner), who accepts Marcello at face value. And then things start really getting weird.

It’s to the eternal credit of writer-director Christophe Honoré that it all, somehow, works? It’s difficult to explain but it’s possibly because Mr Mastroianni was so beloved a person and a symbol of Italy that his resurrection, no matter how ludicrous, is welcomed with open arms. Fabrice immediately accepts Chiara-as-Marcello as Marcello and begins speaking to him as if Chiara-as-Marcello really was his friend come back to life, offering unconditional love and assistance and actually following through. Even Chiara’s teenage boyfriend, movie star Melvil Poupaud (playing himself), joins in the fun – although he more than most expresses concern about Chiara’s mental health. The concept is so extreme that even as the strange extended family plays versions of themselves that there’s no sense of snooping into anybody’s real lives.

Instead there’s a great deal of sympathy for Chiara, who has clearly not been able to live on her own terms from the moment of her birth. At all times she has been judged on the actions of her parents before those of her own. By putting herself into her father’s shoes and trying to be accepted as Chiara-as-Marcello, this is an odd but sincere attempt to determine what part of her identity is her father’s, and what part is her own. Now this can only be done because Mr Mastroianni has been dead since 1996, when Ms Mastroianni was in her early twenties, and because he remains so famous that no time-consuming explanations are necessary. The audience for this movie will go in with its preconceptions, which is entirely the point. By playing with preconceptions and identity, and with the unexpectedly tender performance of Mr Skinner as the fictional point on which all the rest balances, the love and support shown for Chiara-as-Marcello becomes less important than the love shown to Chiara herself. 

It’s further possible to see how this might be a breakthrough for the real Ms Mastroianni’s career; certainly this movie would not have played in the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival if it was merely an exercise in nepotism taken to this extreme. There’s something strange and unusual here about how we create our selves with and without our families that means it’s worth a look even if you know nothing about the famous people at its core. For an industry so enchanted with its own reflection, that’s “Marcello Mio”’s biggest achievement.