Chiara Mastroianni : “an unsolved mystery about myself”
All it took was a reflection. A fleeting vision in a bathroom mirror, on a moody evening. The troubled actress looks into the mirror and, for an instant, sees the face of her dead father staring back at her. She immediately loses consciousness. Is the mirror lying? Is the actress losing her mind? Or is it a ghost gently inaugurating its patient operation of possession? Because the fainting actress is Chiara Mastroianni, and the unexpected reflection in the mirror is that of the fabulous Marcello, the incident does not merely involve a family history of unfinished mourning and heavy sorrow. It’s also the story of cinema, with its ancient myths fading into the night, and of which we are all orphans. In any case, this is the story of Marcello Mio, Christophe Honoré’s new film, starring Chiara Mastroianni once again, but this time in an unexpected role, her own – almost.
That’s our first question: is Chiara Mastroianni a character in the film? “That’s the entire issue”, she laughs. “I’d say she’s a character based on a real person: me. But it’s still a character.” But where does the person end and the character begin? “In real life, my mother doesn’t turn up at my house unannounced to tell me how I should go about this or that casting. We never even talk about this sort of thing together, and she’s never given me any advice. In real life, I have children, whereas in the film I don’t have any. Finally, in real life, I’ve never pretended to be my father, or gone out into the street dressed as him… Even if this purely fictional and fanciful part of the film is in some way true. There were times when I wanted to go further in this physical resemblance I’d heard so much about. When I was 16, for example, I cut my hair to look more like him, but it didn’t turn out as I’d hoped (laughter). In any case, I understand this metamorphosis of my character intimately. It’s as if Christophe [Honoré] has had access to my unconscious.”
This access to his actress’s unconscious also serves as a mirror, and the film is as much a self-portrait as a portrait. The difficult mourning of the father, and its devastating effects on the psychic balance, were already at the heart of Winter Boy – where Paul Kircher’s character became mute. One man’s aphasia is followed by the other’s personality disorder, and Chiara takes this decoding a step further: “In fact, in Winter Boy, Christophe plays his father in the film for a scene. Just as he had me play mine in Marcello Mio. The two films are about the same thing. He probably wouldn’t have made either of the two without the play we did together, Le Ciel de Nantes. In it, he evoked his whole family history, and got me to play his aunt. I brought his aunt to life, he brought my father to life… It’s a kind of exchange. We haven’t talked much about the pain of losing our father at a young age. But we know very well that it’s there, that it binds us together.”
Although Chiara confesses she doesn’t see Christophe Honoré much outside of filming, work often brings them together. Marcello Mio is their seventh collaboration since 17 years and Love Songs. From one role to the next, the characteristics persist. As she remarked on Marcello Mio, Chiara often has no children (Love Songs, Beloved, On a Magical Night) or has them entrusted to her (Making Plans for Lena). In Honoré’s work, the actress often plays characters who have been violated by too many loose ends, agitated by a late adolescent crisis that just won’t go away. “It’s true that something of adolescence often characterizes my characters in his work. A kind of freedom, no doubt, a way of following one’s desires without worrying too much about the consequences.” Also for the second time, after Beloved, Chiara falls in love with a gay man in Marcello Mio. “I hadn’t noticed”, she laughs, “but maybe that says a lot about our relationship.”
Chiara never actually saw much of the father she lost when she was just over twenty. He lived in Italy. She went to school in Paris and lived with her mother. “He still came to see me in Paris quite often. And I spent my school vacations in Italy. I always hoped that the vacations would happen when he was shooting. Joining him on set was my favorite thing. My father wasn’t very good at life. He was always getting himself into very complicated private situations, and vacations bored him. When I was living with him and he wasn’t working, the days were sometimes very long. On a set, he felt safe. That’s where I was happiest with him. I’d sit and watch him play. The first film shoot I attended was Federico Fellini’s City of Women (1980). When the little girl, then the teenager, was at school in Paris, her father called her every day. It was his ritual. Sometimes I got a bit bored, because from one day to the next I didn’t have much to tell him (laughter)”.
She has no personal memories of the years when her parents lived together. She was less than three years old when they split up. “If I want to see my parents as a couple, I have to watch them in films. But in one, my father gets pregnant (Jacques Demy’s A Slightly Pregnant Man), in the other my mother literally becomes his bitch (Marco Ferreri’s Liza). It still makes me feel weird (laughs)”. In Marcello mio, Christophe Honoré organizes a visit to an apartment where the three of them lived until their parents separated. Maria Callas lived in the apartment downstairs, and they heard her vocalizing every day. The real apartment was not available for Honoré’s film. The scene was shot in the same building, in an adjacent apartment. Chiara still wanted to ring the doorbell of the real apartment. “I kind of insisted to my mother that we go there. They let us in. I didn’t recognize anything and that made me sad. My mother said, ‘What did you expect?’ Catherine’s not like me. She only lives in the present. She puts the past at a distance. She doesn’t dream much about the future. She’s only really interested in what’s here. Maybe if I’d experienced things as painful as she did, I wouldn’t look back so much. As for me, contact with the past comforts me. It’s as if it brings me closer to an unsolved mystery about myself.”
Chiara’s nostalgic slant is actualized by hours spent on Google Earth, searching for images of places she once frequented: old family homes, places where she spent her vacations, in search of what has been lost forever and what has been preserved. “I also have this relationship with old paparazzi photos. These images are associated with very violent childhood memories. In Italy, the paparazzi are particularly intrusive, pushing you around, throwing themselves at you to steal images. They terrorized me. In my family, we took very few photos. So I have almost no personal images of my childhood with my father. As a result, today I’m very attached to those images that were stolen from us. They traumatized me at the time and now I’m glad they exist. I look for them and enjoy looking at them.”
We explain to Chiara the feeling that her performance inspired in us: the opposite of an imitation of someone by someone, as we see in so many biopics, but rather a reawakening of childhood gestures, of fatherly postures so many times observed that have always been within her, and that spring up again without any effort “Yes indeed, I’m not imitating him. It’s organic. I let myself be invaded by him. Christophe offered me the most beautiful experience of spiritism.”