The infamous cover of New York Magazine’s December 2022 issue declared that Hollywood is in the middle of a “Nepo Baby Boom,” but this is hardly restricted to the American film industry. Case in point is Christophe Honoré’s laugh-free inside-baseball satire Marcello Mio, a movie which could have been reverse-engineered from that article’s headline––“She Has Her Mother’s Eyes… and Her Agent!”––before any actor willing to play a caricature of themselves had even agreed to sign on. That thankless task is handed to Chiara Mastroianni, a prior collaborator of Honoré who you’d be forgiven for assuming, based on the overall toothlessness of the script, hadn’t met him prior to filming due to how the pair approach the subject of celebrity culture with kid gloves on each side of the camera.
This fictionalized version of Chiara is a failure who has been unable to escape the shadow of her parents (Catherine Deneuve, her mother, sleepwalks through her own supporting turn here), particularly father Marcello Mastroianni, whose legacy as a leading man looms over her own lack of success in the decades since his death. While filming a supporting role for director Nicole Garcia, which was set up by Deneuve, she reaches a breaking point when told she was only cast under the assumption she’d be able to play scenes in the same way her father would. Seeing his ghost in the bathroom mirror one night breeds an epiphany: if she can’t achieve greatness on her own terms, why not literally step into her father’s shoes and become the actor everybody wants her to be? Alas, it doesn’t seem intentional on the part of Mastroianni junior that her performance never finds depth beyond fancy dress costume, failing to offer an authentic perspective on why an actress from a renowned thespian dynasty would have such a complicated relationship with her heritage. Honoré stages plenty of surface-level homages to the actor’s storied back catalogue, but his passion for the works of Mastroianni doesn’t equate to insight––his film is every bit as shallow as the Trevi Fountain.
The clunky allusions to Fellini and De Sica would be forgivable if the dramatic work around them had any satirical heft, but Marcello Mio appears completely oblivious to the current cultural moment, where a lack of gateways into the industry has made famous children easy targets. In fact, taking aim at the trivial concerns of bébés népotiques doesn’t seem to have once crossed the minds of anybody involved in the project, which treats Chiara’s struggles as an artist with a tone-deaf sincerity. The irony here is that, for a general audience to properly invest in the character’s own anxieties about not being respected unless she becomes a clone of her father, the film needs to take them far less seriously, and showcase some self-awareness as to why viewers would consider this to be a first-world problem. The premise is inherently ridiculous, but Honoré has no fun with it––for all the insufferable quirk on display, it approaches the conceit as if it were a hand-wringing exposé about the artist’s struggle to be able to define your work on your own terms. It makes the frequent magical-realist interludes, such as an intermittent friendship with a British NATO soldier stationed in Paris (Hugh Skinner), more of a tough pill to swallow.
The film seems at least partially aware of the ridiculousness of this story but never threads the needle further, blissfully unwilling to acknowledge or even comprehend the way any viewer would perceive the non-existent “problem” of having a famous parent. There’s an inherent disconnect between the industry professionals telling this story and the audience to whom these dilemmas will seem trivial, if not altogether alien. If the film can’t bring itself to poke fun at the culture of nepotism, then it can only ever be a self-indulgent work designed to be appreciated only by those so divorced from reality that it will play out like an explosive, Substance-level satire on how women are held to impossible standards in the entertainment industry, rather than a more scathing parody of a privileged artist. There’s a good idea for a fun satire here; perhaps it could only be realized by a creative team at a further remove from the esteemed world pictured.
Marcello Mio enters limited release on Friday, January 31.