No matter how you look at it, the actress Chiara Mastroianni is what is known today as a 'nepo baby' and that we had always called “daughter of”. Her father is Marcello Mastroianni, and her mother is Catherine Deneuve; from him he took her last name, and with her he made her his First apparition cinematographic in 'For Us Two' (1979), when he was only 7 years old. And since then, despite having achieved reasonable success in France, She has lived trapped in the shadow that he especially projected on her., because of the treatment received on filming and because every time he looked in the mirror it was Dad's face that he saw – the resemblance between the two is astonishing; This is suggested by Christophe Honoré's new film, 'Marcello Mio'which was expected to be a tribute to the protagonist of 'La dolce vita' on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, but today, being submitted to competition in Canneshas turned out to be more of a vindication of his daughter by the director who has worked with her the most times. It is, then, a nice gesture, and that is the best that can be said about her.
Located between documentary and fiction, the film spends a good part of its footage contemplating how Chiara herself wanders around the screen disguised as her father: at times she interacts with people with whom she shares a profession or who are part of her emotional history – her mother, the singer-songwriter Benjamin Biolay, the actor Melvil Poupaud – and at times he does it with a young soldier or a dog until, without providing any evidence in this regard, the film tries to convince us that the experience has provided him with the therapy he so desperately needed. You'd better visit a psychologist.
Similarly inclined to wander aimlessly is the protagonist of the seventh fiction with which Paolo Sorrentino competes for the Palme d'Or, 'Parténope'. The Italian director contemplates her over seven decades, from 1950 to 2023, and uses her as a symbol of his own hometown, Naples, a beautiful, frivolous, lost, determined and inexplicable creature; It is, therefore, the same concept that he already handled with great skill in 'The Great Beauty' (2013) to pay tribute to Rome. But, unlike what happened with the main character of that film, the writer Jep Gambardella, the heroine of 'Parténope' is not a flesh and blood character.
And, although full of events, his life trajectory seems to be above all the excuse that Sorrentino finds to accumulate scenes designed based on his taste for stylistic mannerisms, the solemn staging and the decadent, grotesque and 'kitsch' imagery; and some of those scenes are really overwhelming, but in a 136-minute film there is too much room that doesn't even remotely manage to cause that effect.
A similar type of excess is also the main Achilles heel of the third of the films in competition at the French competition presented this Tuesday, 'Anora'. This is the new work by American Sean Baker, and it has two features that, in reality, are constants in the career of the director of 'Tangerine' (2015), 'The Florida Project' (2017) and 'Red Rocket' (2021) : First, it's a fairy tale set in a marginalized world, and second, it offers a certain insight into the sex industry.
Specific, narrates the eventful process of sentimental education of a young 'stripper' who, after meeting the young son of a Russian oligarch and being blinded by the immense fortune he seems to manage, believes she has found her prince charming in him. Her misadventures that lead her to understand how wrong she was make for an often hilarious comedy, and she reveals Sean Baker as a highly skilled orchestrator of chaos. But 'Anora' lasts no less than 2 hours and 20 minutesand such excess footage makes it evident that when making it its director – who is also its editor – overlooked that one of the qualities that distinguish great comedies is precision, because even the best jokes are no longer as good. if they stretch too much.
