Now I know for certain we are all growing old and that death comes irresistibly like the setting sun.
Marcello is gone.
If you are familiar with the films of Federico Fellini, or the amours of Catherine Deneuve and Faye Dunaway (among many others), or were lucky enough to have been twentysomething in 1960, then you will realize of course that I am speaking of Marcello Mastroianni, who left this sweet life (as in “La Dolce Vita”) last week at age 72.
I never could understand the awe and hysteria at the passings of Elvis Presley and John Lennon–morbid events to be sure, but treated by some as the ends of eras and the demise of civilization, though they were of trifling consequence.
But Marcello. There’s a man who leaves an empty space in the firmament.
French producer Daniel Plantier called him, “the greatest European cinema actor of the last 50 years.” And he was a self-taught actor, at that. Born the son of a country carpenter, he studied to become an architect but instead became an accounting clerk at a movie studio, going on from there to make some 160 films.
Mastroianni was also Fellini’s cinematic instrument, unlike any other.
There would have been Shakespeare without Laurence Olivier, but not as we in the 20th Century have understood it. It was the same with the maestro and Mastroianni. Had there been no Marcello, there could not have been Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” “8 1/2,” “City of Women,” or “Ginger and Fred.” They would have been simply Italian movies–good ones, like Fellini’s “La Strada,” with Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina, but not at all the same, or as important.
It came as a sort of horror to learn that Fellini was first considering Paul Newman, great actor that he is, for what became Mastroianni’s role as the deeply conflicted, world-weary gossip and celebrity newsie in “La Dolce Vita,” the film that gave the world the term “paparazzi.”
Marcello was indeed a screen lover–and off-screen lover. He left (though never divorced) his actress wife Flora after 22 years for Deneuve, who left him a few years later after bearing his actress daughter Chiara.
On screen and off, he was what the French call “un homme amoureux,” a man who loves women. Unlike the scowling muscle men who pass for “screen lovers” in American movies, Marcello was genuinely, consumingly fond of women.
He adored them. He showed no concern whatsoever about making himself vulnerable to them, or even foolish before them–as when the Marcello character plunges into the Trevi Fountain in Rome after the frolicking Anita Ekberg. As when the husband abandons loving wife and children, aristocracy and wealth, to pursue over thousands of miles a beautiful, young, married, Russian woman with enchanting “Dark Eyes” in the Italian-Russian film of the same name.
Or as he so burningly yet respectfully loved the beautiful dwarf in the Argentine film “I Don’t Want to Talk About It,” only to have her leave him for the life of a circus.
This is love as only films like “The English Patient” approach it. As much as he loved women, Mastroianni loved life. Perhaps they were one and the same. It was for this, I think, that he was such an icon for so many of us young men in the 1950s and 1960s. His open, unaffected passion for life–as reflected in the shining eyes of the aging, decrepit but still elegant and romantic dancer he played in “Ginger and Fred”–even as he and his characters questioned the point of their lives made him the ultimate role model for a time of such rampant and ugly materialism.
Certainly he was a role model, though the fullness of his experience could be measured by the paltriness of our attempts to emulate it. We might drive fast sports cars, pursue reckless romances, pass bizarre evenings awash in the decadence of zombie aristocrats and end up on a beach at dawn, staring into the eye of a dead stingray and asking what he was trying to tell us, but without Marcello’s elan and understanding, it was not the same.
I was once fortunate enough to kiss Catherine Deneuve’s hand, and could barely speak an intelligible word for the rest of that day.
Think of Mastroianni’s Deneuvian days–and nights.
I have a memory of him, at the point of passing from middle age to old, seated at a Roman cafe with two beauties at either side.
At the end, which came far too soon, he had with him his best friend, and his daughter by his wife and his daughter by Deneuve. And he had Deneuve.
As his mistress in “La Dolce Vita” kept saying, “Marcello, don’t go.”
