In competition a tribute to Marcello Mastroianni, icon from beyond the Alps

(from Cannes Luigi Noera and Maria Vittoria Battaglia with the kind collaboration of Vittorio De Agrò (RS) – the photos are published courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival)

COMPETITION

MY MARCELLO by Christophe HONORÉ

Synopsis: Playing a version of herself, Chiara Mastroianni assumes the identity of her father Marcello Mastroianni, getting dressed, speaking and breathing like him

Review: It begins – on the film set in Paris to commemorate Marcello Mastroianni, a neurotic director directs her daughter Chiara. How hard is the job of an actor dealing with directors sometimes of this type! To the tune of the famous line “Marcello come here”, the director asks Chiara to be more Marcello and less Catherine! Chiara's resemblance to her illustrious parents is well known but she is also herself. It's the weight of a cumbersome inheritance and to get rid of it Chiara plays her father in a splendid and fascinating way to be herself in this film which is a tribute to Italian cinema.

The premise is not just that Chiara resembles her father, but who has always been in the envious position of being the daughter of two film stars – but also with an illustrious career of her own which includes important directors including Manoel de Oliveira, Raul Ruiz e Claire Denis.

Marcello Mio is an affectionate yet arcane metafiction from French writer-director Christophe Honoré. Chiara Mastroianni plays herself who baffles her loved ones, including his mother Catherine Deneuve (played by Catherine Deneuve), “becoming” his father.

With the feeling of having become the ghost of her father, Chiara seems to be going through a personality crisis – or rather embarks on a performance art project, wearing a black dress, horn-rimmed glasses and a hat to resemble Marcellus from the icon 8 ½ by Fellini. She makes a point of speaking Italian and asks everyone to call her Marcello, to Deneuve's bewilderment and sometimes disturbance, If this disguise does not cause any embarrassment to her new partner, the actor-singer Benjamin Biolay, for her ex in Chiara's real life, the actor Melvil Poupaud is not the same. The eminence of French cinema Fabrice Luchini, instead, he enthusiastically throws himself into the whole adventure in which Chiara involves him.

Above all it is a tribute to his father Marcello! A film that makes you dream of times gone by, as well as the entry into history of the melancholy British sergeant (Hugh Skinner) who during the night makes a clumsy attempt to throw himself into the Seine and becomes a pretext to reinvigorate the plot.

This includes several deviations, including a live Biolay concert where he sings as Marcello and a trip to Italy.

And there is no lack of criticism towards the Meloni government!

The film takes off with Stefania Sandrelli invited to a zany RAI show A wheel free.

By turns irreverent and poetic, demystifying and just a touch reverent, the film thrives on the heartfelt collaboration of Deneuve and the other luminaries playing themselves.

There are some sharp comedic moments. Deneuve announces herself to the owner of her old apartment, receives a warm welcome.

Deneuve is famously adept at conveying his own image and gives it a cheerfully ingenious turn, while Luchini makes mischievous fun of himself like a verbosely erudite dandy.

In the end the film gets lost in a weak screenplay. From this point of view, the ending where all the friends of Marcello and Chiara participate and meet up at the hotel in Formia where Mastroianni used to go and the mother Catherine Deneuve who expresses her disappointment at seeing the love of her life in her daughter: My Marcello!

FORTNIGHT

EAST OF NOON (East 12) in Elkoussy Hall

Synopsis: allegorical story of a musician and a courtesan who use art to rebel against their ancestors.

Review: East Of Noon captures the youthful ferment under autocratic rule in Egypt, thanks to the story of the ambitious young musician Abdo who wishes to leave his country with no future together with his partner Nunna. The rebel Abdo is always in trouble with the local authorities, who force his wise grandmother, Thirst, narrator voice, to protect him from retaliation. The surreal reality, thanks to an amazing editing, transforms a story of youth revolt into a fervent and evocative satire capable of tackling taboo topics.

The black and white with the texture of 16mm gives a dark and imaginative tone to Abdo's story. He spends most of his time locked in his room, creating music with household objects (radio, pipe, moment, typewriter, etc.) or doing odd jobs, how to dig ditches for graves and treasures.

The film gives us a plot of everyday life thanks to Galala's shop, where people can pawn or trade items for the many knickknacks that adorn its walls. Pieces like watches, toys and appliances. Although it is shot mostly in black and white, East Of Noon features occasional color flashbacks. These sequences – which carry with them the kind of escapist imagination that Galala claims Abdo has – take place by the sea, away from the dusty and squalid confines of the city. More black and white dream sequences, in which people disguised as animals chase Abdo, they often recall Fellini's sense of surrealism, where the boundaries between harsh reality and nightmarish memories collide.

Despite its ethereal character aimed at the supernatural, East Of Noon remains planted in real life, even in its transgressiveness. It covers the issues of rape without taboos, of abortion and sex work in a mix of the country's history in which the autocratic rulers of this impoverished city do not just want to control Abdo, but they want to break it, extinguish his confident innocence. And it looks like they might do it before Abdo, with the help of a stubborn Nunna, regain your tenacity. The final upheaval in a chaotic crumbling of the social order that sees young people finally take up arms, characterizes a courageous film that leaves its mark on the viewer.

Ghost Cat Anzu of. Yoko Kuno e Nobuhiro Yamashita

Synopsis: adaptation from the manga by Takashi Imashiro, which follows the turbulent friendship between a girl and a ghost cat, who acts as her guardian when she is sent to live with her country monk grandfather.

Review: It is the story of an eleven-year-old girl Karin entrusted by her inept widowed father Tetsuya to her monk grandfather who lives in the temple with the ghost cat (hence the title of the film). The story suffers from the authors' lack of experience, but its deceptively abrasive tone and wild story detours are distinctive. It suffers slightly from pacing issues and a cumbersome shift in tone in the third act, veering from cute, casual danger to full-on demonic assault.

Adapted from Bakeneko Anzu-chan manga by Takashi Imashiro, the film is Yôko Kuno's directorial debut, an emerging talent in animation and manga creator. This ghost cat has claws and, despite its affable appearance it is probably not suitable for younger audiences. After all, this and a cat, whose response to the theft of his bicycle is expressed in a cutting fury full of anger.

Animation enthusiasts, however, they will probably be fascinated by the creative use of rotoscoping in the film, which gives a rare authenticity to the interpretations of the characters.

From the beginning, the fun soundtrack and the sun-bleached romance of the background illustrations (the story mostly takes place in a sleepy coastal town) they work in contrast to the harsher aspects of the story.

The film begins with a father and daughter arriving by train in a location where Buddhist temples are located. He has returned home to the elderly monk father and immediately gets to the point of his visit asking him for money to pay off a debt incurred. As mentioned, the Cat Anzu, known as the Ghost because he has survived many lives, has lived for many years at his elderly father's house. (the seven lives of cats!) and behaves like an apparently joyful human being.

Understandably saddened, young Karin is not immediately receptive to her grandfather's suggestion that Anzu, the big giggling, flatulent ghost cat, should act as his companion and guardian. On the other hand, Anzu has a busy schedule: a list of clients who give massages, and in his free time he loses huge amounts of money playing pachinko and has run-ins with the local police over traffic violations.

After comedy tones in most of the story, this one takes an unexpected turn, when the friends discover a portal to hell through a public bathroom sink. It's unclear whether the same rule of nines applies to ghost cats, but Anzu has probably had several lives taken from him by the end of the unexpectedly violent final act.

The viewer witnesses the unrelated adventures of Karin and the Ghost Cat together with all the animals that populate the Temple Region and for us Westerners it is difficult to fully understand the spirit of such a complex and inspiring cartoon.

And so from story to story Karin's elderly monk grandfather leads them to the gates of hell in search of the soul of their mother who suddenly died.

To us it seemed like a materialist vision of life!

luigi Noera