Marcello Mastroianni In The Assassin – Elegance And Truth In Acting – The Great Acting Blog

Marcello Mastroianni possessed the rare ability to work his moment-to-moment impulses in concert with the dramatic structure of a scene. Many actors lose their shape in search of ‘naturalism’, while others are overly technical and lose creativity. With Mastroianni however, his performances are seemless. It is hard to see what he is doing – he is neither purely improvisatory nor purely technical – we cannot see the architecture of his work. His performances are so fused with his soul that he simply seems alive on screen.

One of the ways he achieves this is by eschewing preconceived emotions or characterization-by-design, and instead he uses physcial action to give definition to the character he is playing. The result is an artistic form of screen acting: performances of elegance and truth, we experience the unique mystery of the personality.

Elio Petri’s The Assassin [1961] is perhaps not Marcello Mastroianni’s most famous work, but it is, nonetheless, an essential example of his art. Mastroianni plays ‘a dandyish antiques dealer’ who is arrested at his home without any apparent explanation [director Petri was influenced by Kafka].

In the clip here, Mastroianni is being kept in a waiting room at the police station. We are not so concerned with the dialogues or with the mis en scene here, but with how Mastroianni’s simple, deliberate, precise physical movements express the complex state of the character; in turn frustrated, bored, frightened, distracted. The results are elegant and true.

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