Roma Elastica

From Viennale

Sometimes, there are things more important than making sense—like glamour, outrageousness and a love of bodies in constant metamorphosis. In Bertrand Mandico’s ROMA ELASTICA, set in 1982, Marion Cotillard plays Eddie, a French star diagnosed with a brain tumour who hits the Eternal City with Valentina, her “bodyguard, make-up artist, friend and troubleshooter,” played by a peroxide-blonde Noémie Merlant. Eddie is there to make what is probably her last film, a feminist science-fiction story set in 2026, a time of fascism and environmental crisis. If this sounds like the set- up for a sincere meditation on aging and catastrophe, think again; this is Mandico, after all. With maximalist flair, he orchestrates a paean to a cinema of perversity and sensation, peppering scenes set at parties and on film shoots with references to Italian gialli, Andrzej Żuławski, David Cronenberg and John Carpenter. The film oozes and shimmers its way through Eddie’s days and nights, with classical sculptures and architecture combining with period fashion and graffiti to evoke an atmosphere in which persistence and ruin are indistinguishable. Is the postmodernist cinema of the 1970s and 1980s now our antiquity? Mandico suggests it may be so. (Erika Balsom)