Acting Ambivalent – Marcello Mastroianni In Down The Ancient Stairs | The Great Acting Blog

Mastroianni plays Dr. Bonaccorsi, a psychiatrist whose life is spent working with patients at a hospital in Tuscany – his dream is to eradicate mental illness entirely. He is also a prolific ladies man, and is engaged in affairs with at least three of the hospital’s staff. A trainee nurse arrives (played Françoise Fabian) and rejects not only Mastroianni’s methods, but his attempts at seduction too, triggering his insecurities and a downward spiral. Mastroianni, one the key actors of that titanic era of Italian cinema during the middle part of the twentieth century, is on terrific form here. Always a charismatic screen figure, with a complex persona made-up of charm mixed with dissatisfaction, Mastroianni is of that generation of actors who strive for simplicity and minimalism, excluding the non-essential, so that what they include is powerful and meaningful. He has a terrifically expressive face too, his thoughts occasionally flash across it while his emotions seep out through his eyes.

Mastroianni’s performance in Down The Ancient Stairs however, is a masterclass of ambivalence, of playing a character who holds two opposing views simultaneously.    His Professor Bonaccorsi is driven obsessively to find a cure for mental illness on the one hand, while on the other, he wants to get as far away as possible from the profession because he is terrified of becoming ill himself (both positions are fuelled by the fact that his father committed suicide and that his sister is an extreme patient in the hospital). Mastroianni though, doesn’t try to explain the character’s ambivalence, he doesn’t try to indicate it, he doesn’t try to drag it through every line of dialogue. No. He is patient, he operates with the script rather then trying to add “characterisation” to it, he allows the script to do it’s work. He simply does the actions called for in each scene. In one scene we see exhilaration when he thinks he’s discovered the “germ of madness”, in another we see him lie down on a spare bed in one of the wards as if he were a patient, in another we see him visit a lover because he is depressed and lonely, and in another still, we see him angrily explain why there is no hope for his patients and that he must leave the hospital immediately.  The sum total of Mastroianni’s actions, scene-by- scene, over the course of the film, add up to something wonderfully complex.

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