Marcello Mastroianni – The Great Hero

He may well be called Europe’s great hero—though certainly not of mainstream celluloid. He was the great hero of art cinema. For more than fifty years he stood, in his own right, as Europe’s representative figure. In the court of world cinema, among the few actors who left a permanent mark, Marcello Mastroianni remains one. As an icon, he is the very emblem of cinema’s intellectual tradition.
 
Visconti, Blasetti, Fellini, Antonioni, Angelopoulos—Europe’s most renowned filmmakers discovered in him the distilled essence of European manhood. In Europe’s darkest hours of crisis, Mastroianni became its hero. In his performances, the anguish of the age, its doubts, anger, grief, despair—all found visible form. Fellini declared that the face of this introspective actor was none other than the mirror of Europe’s collective self-consciousness. It was Fellini’s La Dolce Vita that first gave Mastroianni international fame.
 
In early life he acted on stage, and during his days of imprisonment in a Nazi camp, he learned the harsh truths of the earth. The helpless surrender of Europe, its political and social decay, the moral collapse of its public life, the middle classes and the intellectuals drowning in perverse sexual indulgence—none of this remained unknown to him.
 
As Marcello Rubini, the journalist of La Dolce Vita, Mastroianni effortlessly reported the Europe of the sixties. He portrayed, with unmatched precision, a dialectical figure caught between ultimate hedonism and ultimate solitude. His face evoked, like those of ancient Greek drama, an admixture of torment and revelry. Or else the mask of a talkative, weary soul. His visage seemed the very reflection of a decaying society, of a world in crisis.
 
In Antonioni’s La Notte he again embodied the intellectual bourgeoisie, trapped in doubt and longing for imagined freedom. As the writer in that film, his eyes and face bore the questions, the corrosive desire to destroy, and the ultimate surrender to reality. Who else but he could render this with such mastery?
 
There was always a strange melancholy spread across his face. A vacant gaze that could freeze the blood in your chest, as if he had just emerged from a concentration camp. And then suddenly, with a smile, he could flood you with a contrary, enchanting warmth.
 
In Pietro Germi’s Divorce: Italian Style, this melancholy found another register—not as serious a character as in his other roles, but tinged with farce. Yet he never appeared a clown. His acting made society itself appear the true clown.
 
In Mario Monicelli’s The Organizer, he played the role of a protester, organizing factory workers to demand their rights. In that film, Mastroianni painted a portrait of an oppressed Europe.
 
With age, his acting and his body underwent remarkable transformation. The frenzy of middle age gave way to nostalgia in maturity. In Anna Maria Tatò’s I Remember, Yes I Remember, he turned back toward the past in a role of extraordinary middle-aged depth.
 
It is said an actor’s supreme gift lies in fitting his body into the shape of a character. Eisenstein had elevated this gift to universality. European cinema, his heir, honored it for decades. Mastroianni carried this capacity—this entering into a character’s very flesh—to its extreme. I Remember is proof of this transformation.
 
Later, in Angelopoulos’s The Beekeeper and The Suspended Step of the Stork, he appeared in roles of greater physical intensity. In these two films, he seemed to bring back the sixties into the very threshold of the twenty-first century, pouring himself wholly into aesthetic protest. Society had changed, man had changed, cinema had changed—this was no longer Europe’s cinema, but Hollywood’s. And with his performances, Mastroianni slapped this era of cinema across the face.
 
Angelopoulos provided the perfect canvas, for these films were themselves assaults on contemporary “hobbyist” cinema—both in narrative and in craft. In The Suspended Step of the Stork, the hero’s silent retreat from a rotten political life struck like a thunderous slap across the age. In that film, time and again, Mastroianni seemed legendary.
 
I recall especially that unforgettable scene: people uprooted from their homeland, relocated under military guard. In the inhuman railway carriage sits a middle-aged man with vacant eyes—motionless, silent. The way he sat was itself a magnificent protest.
 
This was not only against modern society. It felt as though ancient civilization itself was being uprooted. As though the old languages of cinema, acting, and film-making were being torn up and transported under armed guard. In that scene, director Angelopoulos and hero Mastroianni both appeared as time’s own prophets, legendary figures. As if to say, in Christ’s words: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
 
Who can say whether our age and our lives deserve such forgiveness? Yet it may be said: in transcending life, this great actor, in his director’s timeless film, entered into the immortal life of cinema.