IMPERFECT, IRRESISTIBLE

By RICHARD CORLISS

He died in Paris, attended by his longtime love Catherine Deneuve and their daughter Chiara. But Marcello Mastroianni's compatriots would not let the actor known as "the face of Italy" pass into memory without a poetic farewell. So just after sunset on the day he succumbed, at 72, to pancreatic cancer, his wife Flora stood with the mayor of Rome and 500 other mourners at the Trevi Fountain, into whose waters Anita Ekberg had lured Mastroianni in the famous scene from Federico Fellini's 1960 La Dolce Vita. Now the lights faded, the water from the Neptune statue stopped, a lone flutist played the theme from 8 1/2 as two black drapes were stretched over the fountain. It was a last token of love to a man who was imperfect and irresistible.

That was Mastroianni: the postheroic hero, defining the European male in all his charm, complexity, failure. Husband and lover, actor and movie star, deft comedian and suavest delineator of atomic-age anomie--there was a Marcello for every sexual taste, every moral mood. And he loved being those people; that's why he kept at it for a half-century, in more than 120 pictures. "When I make films," he said in 1987, "I am absolutely happy. And when the film is finished, I am looking for another film. Otherwise my life is a little more bored."

His life, from the beginning, was hardly boring. Born in Fontana Liri, 50 miles outside Rome, to a carpenter who went blind and a housewife who went deaf ("They were like a comic couple," he said), Mastroianni did time in a German labor camp during World War II, then escaped to Venice and later to Luchino Visconti's famed Milan theater troupe. The screen had to claim this face, so sensitive, masculine and alert, but it took a decade or more for him to achieve true Marcellosity. In Visconti's rapturous White Nights (1957), Mastroianni spent the whole movie pleading fruitlessly for Maria Schell's love. To impress her he does a spaz-jazz dance, hilarious in its frantic clumsiness. At the end he walks off like Chaplin, alone into the snowy dawn.

It was an older, world-weary image--a touch of gray at the temples, a wistfulness for waylaid innocence--that made Mastroianni a worldwide star. As the Dolce Vita gossipist, the moviemaker in Fellini's great 8 1/2 (1963) and the writer in Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (1961), he moved like a man in perpetual postcoital ennui, elevating spiritual passivity to a metaphysic and a fashion statement. "Mastroianni" became a kind of emotional cologne for the modern male. And no one wore the style as elegantly as he: the dark suit, the narrow tie, the eyes of a man who's been up three nights straight doing things that would excite anyone but him. These art films won international success because of his effortless allure. La Notte, with its blank walls and arid stares, was withal an essay in star quality. We could happily watch Marcello being unhappy, doing anything or nothing. He was charisma in lethargy.

But Mastroianni was also a clown, yelping like a hyena in heat when Sophia Loren (his partner in 13 films) strips for him in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963). As the Sicilian aristocrat in Pietro Germi's wonderfully malicious Divorce Italian Style (1962), he is a creature of tics and slouches, plotting his wife's death and stalking the seraphic Stefania Sandrelli with the gait of a mopey Groucho. He made informed fun not only of these familiar Italian comic figures but also of his own star machismo. At the end of a guest stint on Laugh-In, TV's vaudeville for the Nixon years, he stared moonily into the camera, then yanked off his toupee, revealing a few vagrant strands of hair. The ardor, the bedroom voice, the coiffure--it's all pretend, see? Acting!

And act he did, in a surprising variety of roles over the decades: as the soft-spoken labor leader in The Organizer (1963), the homosexual fighting Fascism in A Special Day (1977), the Chekhovian philanderer in Dark Eyes (1987), the gentle padrone besotted by a dwarf in the Argentine I Don't Want to Talk About It (1993), his finest late role. He worked with ambitious auteurs from Altman to Zurlini; he lent his bankability to obscure projects. In his last year he starred with Chiara in Three Lives and Only One Death, an elaborate jape by the Paris-based Chilean Raul Ruiz, and appeared with fellow icon Jeanne Moreau in a sweet vignette--a poignant farewell kiss--in Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds.

While Mastroianni worked and wooed around the world, his one and only wife of 46 years stoically stayed home. "Perhaps I don't be so faithful," he said in 1987. "Whoever lives with an actor has to accept that he needs to live a little in his fantasies." Perhaps Flora accepted him, as moviegoers did, for the contradictory beguiler he was.

At the end of the three-hour carouse of La Dolce Vita, Marcello sees a beautiful girl on a beach. She has something important to tell him, but he can't quite hear her and he must join his reveling friends. As the movies' most famous Latin lover since Valentino walks away, the girl smiles benignly. She might have been in the Trevi Fountain crowd last week, recalling an actor who displayed the foibles of modern man, and the grace and gravity with which one man can bear them.