Marcello Mastroianni, the legendary actor of many outstanding films, is set to visit India during the ten-day 33rd International Film Festival of India, which begins in the capital today. Mastroianni’s presence at a retrospective of his films is a wonderful occasion for us. My particular favourite are his appearances in Vittorio De Sica’s masterful three-episode series, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), as Carmine Mellino, Renzo and Augusto Rusconi opposite Sophia Loren. De Sica had even hailed his acting as the ‘rising spirit of light’. Mastroianni’s cinematic journey (1923-96) was uniquely fruitful and gave viewers with a virtual cornucopia of stylised performances: in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, 8 and Half, Fred and Ginger, De Sica’s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Marriage Italian Style, A Place For Lovers, Sunflower, Antonioni’s The Night and John Boorman’s Leo the Man. What inspired him to act in these films was his ‘passion and love’ for the characters and situations that were so real, so humorous as well as so serious. In his acting, Mastroianni avoided being stereotyped. For him getting the ‘feel’ of the character was an artist’s ultimate realisation. While acting in the Boorman film, he commented, ‘‘Why do Americans find acting so difficult? For me acting is like making love. While I am doing it I enjoy it, and then when it is over, I hope I can do it again tomorrow.’’ Mastroianni sometimes ruffled directors like Fellini, De Sica and Antonioni, by his own improvisations. Take, for example, his role as Giovanni, the eminent writer in Antonioni’s The Night, who was susceptible to the lure of the rich and powerful. And yet, in the end, he resisted it and returned to his ten-year marriage with Lidia, played by Jeanne Moreau. Mastroianni, well-acquainted with the failure of marriage as an institution in his country, rendered into an epiphany his last-minute dialogue: ‘‘Behind your face I saw something purer and deeper, in which I was reflected. It was you I saw, in a dimension that included all the time I have left to live. All those years were there, but also all those I lived without knowing you, waiting to know you.’’ Then it continued: ‘‘Our whole life should be for me like this morning’s awakening, feeling you not only beside me but forming a part of me, in a way nothing and no one could destroy, not even the dulling influence of habit hanging over us like a threat.’’ Similarly, he enlivened his role as director in Fellini’s 8 and Half in such a manner that it appeared as if he lived beneath the skin of the scripted character. So noticeable was his finely-tuned acting in La Dolce Vita, that it became a metaphor for a world sinking in the loss of values. It’s little wonder then that Antonioni was constrained to say, ‘‘The actor is a kind of Trojan horse within the director’s citadel.’’ And, yet, Mastroianni’s respect for the great directors he worked with seldom left him. For his Indian fans then, the actor’s visit should be a magic moment, one to understand his great body of work that was always tinged by humanism.
