It’s fortunate to have Christophe Honoré’s wonderful Marcello Mio, starring Catherine Deneuve and her daughter Chiara Mastroianni, open alongside a restoration of his very daunting 2004 Ma Mère, starring Isabelle Huppert and Louis Garrel. Both films concern parent–child relations but take contrasting approaches to what is taught and learned through those primal connections. Each movie addresses controversial notions about identity and heritage. It’s a perfect double bill for this moment of cultural revolution.
In Marcello Mio, Honoré uses the real-life example of Chiara Mastroianni’s confronting the memory of her father, actor Marcello Mastroianni, by taking on his image and playacting his screen persona (the matinée idol of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and 8½, De Sica’s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, and Germi’s Divorce Italian Style). On personal terms with past collaborators Deneuve and Chiara, Honoré ignores superficial celebrity to play with the prospect of spiritual empathy.
Chiara applies lessons from her father’s art to her own career — testing the bemused tolerance of her famous, now aged screen-idol mother. After fainting at her father’s image in a mirror (her bathroom resembling the one in 8½), she says “I saw myself as him.” Deneuve responds, “You have his expressions, but you don’t have his face. You look like me, too. Not just Mastroianni. There’s as much of me in you.”
Marcello Mio turns this universal, everykid quandary into a film-buff caprice, especially when Chiara lowers a pair of sunglasses and gives the famous Marcello leer. (“Looking Italian,” Elvis Costello called it.)
This is an emotional documentary that morphs into a dream but keeps bumping into reality. (Chiara participates in a clumsy spoof of the legendary Trevi Fountain scene from La Dolce Vita.) Fabrice Luchini, the co-star of Chiara’s newest film project, welcomes the folie à deux: “I’d like to dream with you” — a combination Rohmer-and-Rivette conceit that Honoré sustains with charm and lightness. What looks like an identity crisis is actually Chiara’s pursuit of her spiritual foundation — the search that con artist TV shows like Henry Louis Gates’s Finding Your Roots has perverted into political correctness — social-justice equity for the rich and famous.
However, Ma Mère is expressly about perversion. Honoré adapts a novel by outré French philosopher Georges Bataille to chronicle the sexual initiation of pious Catholic schoolboy Pierre (Garrel) at the prurient behest of his upper-class prostitute mother Hélène (Huppert). Ma Mère represents Honoré’s early exploration of transgressive homosexuality (a phase of gay filmmaking degenerated from Bataille, Foucault, and Genet), which always conflicted with his fascination for Cocteau-derived mythology evident in his later, more powerful movies Winter Boy, Sorry Angel, On a Magical Night, Love Songs.
Mother obviously doesn’t know best when Hélène sets up Pierre’s tryst with a young hooker then advises, “Maybe now you know desire reduces us to weakness.” This is much different from the sociological insight of eccentric motherhood in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and the Jungian psychology in Bertolucci’s Luna.
Although Ma Mère reveals Honoré’s past ambivalence about behavior and morality, it comports with current gender confusion. There is narrative tension — and some tedium — in observing Honoré’s filmmaking aptitude as it develops. Hélène Louvart’s limpid cinematography makes a vision of Pierre’s descent into depravity as Honoré adjusts his moral focus. He eventually confronts the boy’s catechism memories during a symbolic rainstorm:
As they did not like to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a discerning mind, to do unsuitable things: being filled with all injustice, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, homicidal thoughts, strife, deceit, bad habits, whisperers, revilers, enemies of God. Some who understand the law of God still practice such actions. They are worthy of death. They not only do them but even commend those who practice them.
If this paraphrase is Bataille’s idea of blasphemy, it backfires. Honoré turns it to very contemporary irony — coincidentally, one that applies to actress Cynthia Nixon’s recent Ma Mère–style speech, in which she defended the trans movement after the presidential executive order banning trans surgery on children. Nixon’s parent–child nightmare proves that the culture has already reached the point of “injustice-wickedness-
Young rebel Honoré confused sex with religion, but mature Honoré thinks differently: “All of us can confuse a film with a real memory,” Luchini instructs Chiara. Such bewilderment creates Marcello Mio’s best moments: Chiara’s recalling an early romance with actor Melvil Poupaud, who is newly perplexed, Deneuve’s delivering an Umbrellas of Cherbourg aria on her love affair with Marcello. And Chiara’s cross-dressing sparks an homage to Marcello’s most romantic film, Visconti’s White Nights, this time rescuing a suicidal gay soldier. It’s dazzlingly transgressive but not in the manner of culturally destructive activist-filmmakers. Honoré keeps Chiara buoyed on the memories and legacy of family. He does justice to her parents as artists and human beings. Marcello Mio is a correction of Ma Mère and rescues faith, desire, and imagination.