`I Remember' Reviews Marcello Mastroianni's Film Career

Movie review XXX "Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember," documentary by Anna Maria Tato. 195 minutes. Varsity, today through Thursday. No rating.

When Marcello Mastroianni died three years ago, several of the obituaries focused on the lightweight vehicles in which he co-starred with Sophia Loren, especially her striptease scene in "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow." It was almost as if an amiable co-star had died, someone who hadn't amounted to much aside from his pairings with Italy's most famous actress.

Yet during the art-house boom of the 1960s, Mastroianni was a towering figure, starring in the most popular foreign-language film of the period ("La Dolce Vita"), becoming Fellini's on-screen alter ego, working with Antonioni, Visconti and De Sica, and demonstrating his versatility and brilliance in film after film. He was so respected that eventually he earned three Academy Award nominations for best actor - unprecedented for a foreign-language performer, and a feat Roberto Benigni seems unlikely to match.

If it accomplishes nothing else, this rambling, worshipful, mostly engrossing documentary puts his career back in perspective. "Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember" was directed by his companion of 22 years, Anna Maria Tato (whose writing-directing career goes back to 1978), and it barely mentions his relationships with Faye Dunaway or Catherine Deneuve (with whom he had a famous daughter). Expect no gossip here.

But if it has little to say about his personal life, the movie offers a unique approach to his work. Mastroianni talks at length about the 170-plus films he made between 1947 and 1996 (some were released after his death), and Tato has obviously gone to some trouble to acquire fine-quality clips that illustrate exactly what he's saying. (Some of the films he mentions have already been lost or destroyed.)

It starts with Mastroianni remembering the movie matinees he attended as a child, when Fred Astaire was his idol, then it segues to a stage musical, "Ciao Ruby" (1966), in which Mastroianni tap-danced, and his appearance as an aging dancer in Fellini's "Ginger and Fred" (1985).

Mastroianni talks about his meticulous performance in Mario Monicelli's "The Organizer" (1963), a flop in Italy which he accurately describes as "a wonderful film" that finally found an appreciative audience in the United States.

He mentions his "hunger for new experiences," which sometimes led him to make bad films (he concedes that about 20 are "really rotten"), and of his love for Chekhov, which led him to make "Dark Eyes" (1987). He talks about campaigning for his great comic role in "Divorce Italian Style" (1962), preparing for the movies with stage roles in "Streetcar Named Desire" and "Death of a Salesman," and about getting typecast.

"At 72," he sighs, "I'm still the Latin lover." Still, he claims, "if I'd only made good films, I'd be afraid of myself."

He remembers the humbling experience of co-starring with his untrained brother, Ruggero, in a 1971 costume epic, "Scipione Detto Anche L'Africano" (his mother thought Marcello was good but not as good as his brother), and wonders what it would have been like to lead "a normal life."

Most of these interviews were conducted in Portugal during his last year, when he was indeed 72 (we see him at a birthday party that would be his last), and there's a touching philosophical resignation about some of his comments.

"Perhaps," he says, "memories are all we truly own.