Had he not been relegated to the Cannes Film Festival at midnight, Roma Elastica Certainly could have jostled an official competition all in all quite lukewarm this year. The latest feature film by filmmaker Bertrand Mandico strangles the society of the show by insolently questioning the future of Art and the banishment of its disposable agile. Marion Cotillard marries the role of Eddie, an actress sick of her status as an actress subject to the implacable law of time. It's the end of an era. « Young, that's the only word I can swallow. To digest? » seems to question the star who is about to make her comeback and who already seems tired. During a last filming in the Roman city, drunkenness of freedom proper to the one who knows himself condemned to death will defeat all the expectations of the storyboard.
Burning idols
So far rooted in a subtle mixture of fantasy, fantasy and science fiction, the previous films by Bertrand Mandico (Conann, After Blue) may not have dealt with their subject so frontally. Roma Elastica is at the crossroads of genres. Mandico chose two epochs as its setting: on the one hand, Italian cinema of the 1980s, the fall of which coincides with the development of television; on the other, its retrofuturistic variation, satires a world ravaged by the most absurd postmodernity. The latest Mandico rejects the transformation of Art into ordinary merchandise, this « Kulturindustry » and Horkheimer.
From Eddie's perspective, space-time expands between the 1980s and this grotesque dystopic future, drowning all intelligible landmarks. Roma Elastica manages to make the big gap between the Italian classic cinema of Minnelli, Visconti or Fellini, the giallo aesthetic of Dario Argento and the modernity of Pasolini. Mandico could have been afraid of « caress big fawns » As he said at Cannes. Only a city like Rome allows this baroque marriage at the borders of kitsch. A subtle balance that the filmmaker has always been able to capture on screen thanks to his out-of-standard style.
Rome is the epicenter of art history. Here are centuries of artistic research in one place; The Roman statues found in many of the film's drawings recall both the weight of the masters and the fascination they exert on any author. To represent this inner journey, the French filmmaker multiplies the journeys, giving almost tunes of musical comedy to certain livened sequences, carried away by the verve of a Marion Cottilard one can no longer claim. This perpetual movement betrays an actress's concern to regain her freedom. It is also the doubts that mark any creative process and gnaw the author, obsessed with the idea of leaving something to a world where everything seems to have already been said.
Roman fever
In the centre of the device, the fallen star is sometimes imprisoned, sometimes vindictive. Yesterday locked up by the monolithic vision of his fans, locked up by his producers, sexualized by men from a young age, Eddie wants to regain control. By alcohol, by drugs, by revolt. From the first sequence of Roma Elastica, she leaves the set after a brilliant performance where she gives the replica to a man stabbed in the heart. Is it a fantasy or a feverish delirium? Whatever, we will never really know what stratum the events of this parallel reality are in. It is on this ambiguous ridge line that Mandico moves our gaze between times. Roma Elastica questions the relationship between past and unborn works. At the Cannes Film Festival, the director recognized his fascination with this double killing, which was the constitution of every actress:
« Everyone knows, they are martyred in their young age, as victims of cinema predators, then at a mature age, because industry tends to reject them. It's something that upsets me. I wanted to work on this with the disease that symbolizes the film industry. »
The star, drunk to vomit from her image, despises journalists and conches the presenters of the small screen. In the midst of the paparazzi's incessant flashes, Eddie made a way, followed by his assistant who was adulating. Peroxidized hair, triangular sunglasses, dressed in an integral combi, his impresario played by an unrecognizable Noémie Merland, is a caricatural shadow that cannot be detached. The « rehabilitation » Eddie's personal will rather go through a cocktail of high and wandering. Eddie prefers the little hands of seventh art, those that touch matter rather than the lilies of notes. For a time, she will associate with this gang of artists, where the individual gets involved in the collective. These marginals are obsessed with special organic effects. The taste of tentacles and flesh. These spiritual renegades and disciples of Andrzej « Droogs » dMechanical orange. Eddie's course of action is to get rid of the void of non-object transgression. Nothing should be free, otherwise it is the society of the show that returns to gallop. The prophetic search for a visionary cinema haunts the characters of Roma Elastica.
Who runs the other one?
By focusing on Eddie, we don't really know who the actor or character is telling his own story. « I was sentenced to death so let me have fun. » claims Eddie in a staggering plea against vanity. Unless it's Marion Cotillard who addresses us... Roma Elastica is a film on the parallax trajectory. The filmmaker moves the centre of gravity of an actress who wants to tear her freedom from those who direct her, including director. To regain free freedom against the imperative of production, this protuberant tumor which ends up eating away any author in the future.
For some years already, Marion Cotillard seems to distance himself from large sterile productions for more intimate projects. A year ago, The Ice Tower of Lucile Hadžihalilović (see Interview) already gave to see another Marion Cotillard, poisoned by his own image. Roma Elastica reveals another side of a polymorphic actress. Like Demi Moore, star of yesterday, ruled out by Hollywood and rehabilitated a quarter of a century later in The Substance, the one who played the Môme chooses the risk taking.
Weared by a flamboyant international casting, Roma Elastica Once again the actors Franco Nero or Ornella Muti, emblematic figures of the beautiful era of Italian cinema. A beautiful tribute to show to those who were suddenly erased by postmodernity. « I added a new layer to the history of Rome » as fun to say Bertrand Mandico. Before or behind the camera, actors and directors all care about the image they will leave behind. Like the Roman statues that crossed the remains of time, the characters still survive the actors. Roma Elastica is a jubilatory film and certainly one of the most insolent proposals of this 79nd Cannoese edition.
« I'm sick of fate. I want to live, die, fall, start over. The only privilege of an actress is immortality. »
When Mandico hangs with Lynch and Fellini, the Italian cinema bis recomposes like a feverish film where a dying actress is still looking for her last breath of light. In this retro-futuristic opera that approaches the trance, the filmmaker relaxes his rituals: less hermeism, more flesh, and a Cotillard/Merlant duo that vibrates a diffuse attachment. As for the satire of the film industry, it slams dry, between body worship and programmed forgetfulness of its exhausted muses. Not for everyone, but damn alive.