An Actor Despairs

By J.C.

SALUT I'ARTISTE

Directed by YVES ROBERT

Screenplay by JEAN-LOUP DABADIE and

YVES ROBERT

This movie is slight enough to get blown away by an early spring breeze.

Sort of funny, kind of sad, Salut I'Artiste is a halfway exercise in depicting the addled, smoothly desperate life of an actor named Nicholas. His face, in passing, is familiar, but ask for his autograph and the name will not register. Nicholas makes his living doing day work in movies, character bits in commercials and specialty acts at small clubs. It is a hard scuffle, but Nicholas dotes on the comfortable insecurity of the life. At least it offers a neat opportunity to fend off deeper involvement with his mistress Peggy (Franc,oise Fabian) and keeps an eventual reconciliation with his wife (Carla Gravina) at a safe distance. Nicholas' only deep commitment is to the dubious luxury of noninvolvement.

Bemused Talents. Besides the quite ravishing Miss Fabian, the movie can boast the presence of Marcello Mastroianni as Nicholas. He is not seen in major movies as widely as he used to be, so Salut I'Artiste is, if nothing else, a wholly welcome reminder of just how extraordinary an actor he can be. It would seem folly to cast Mastroianni as a nonentity were it not for his wonderfully bemused talents for self-effacement. Many of his best performances (8 1/2, say, or The Organizer) have challenged and contradicted the popular notion of him as a kind of languid Lothario. Director Yves Robert makes no heavy demands of Mastroianni here, which is unfortunate. Nicholas' infrequent bouts with despair are as frivolous as anything else in his life, but Mastroianni has worked enough by now to know about making major moments out of minor incidents. There is at least one such here. Split with his girl friend, his wife and sons away on unannounced holiday, Nicholas shacks up with his co-star in a new play. As she prattles on in bed, telling endless postcoital anecdotes about her grandmother, Mastroianni stares straight ahead, bereft, bored, glazed, luckless, irked, satisfied but uncompelled, paying dearly now for his pleasure. It is a scene Mastroianni manages with the kind of comic melancholy that comes from depths too seldom sounded. J.C.

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