Roma Elastica

Roma Elastica

A celluloid love letter scented with powder and cigarette smoke in the latest film from visionary Bertrand Mandico

A gravely ill movie star arrives in Rome for a film shoot and begins to lose her grip on the line between reality and nightmare. A dazzling, grotesque cinematic fever dream from Bertrand Mandico, starring Marion Cotillard and blending horror, drama, and dark comedy.

Eddie, a French movie star whose fame is slowly beginning to fade, arrives in Rome to shoot a science fiction film that may be her last. She has just learned that she has a brain tumor. Accompanied by her loyal makeup artist and friend Valentina, she encounters former colleagues, fans, and figures who seem to have wandered into the Eternal City straight from a fever dream. Young Italian squatters throw wild parties at her hotel, marble statues appear to come alive, and the streets of Rome shimmer beneath a soft neon glow. Increasingly, Eddie finds herself unable to distinguish waking life from nightmare.

In “Roma Elastica”, the latest film from French visionary Bertrand Mandico, anything seems possible, yet nothing is quite what it appears to be. It is as though Federico Fellini had made a film while inhabiting the body of a motorcycle-riding vampire, chain-smoking her way through the night. Futuristic costumes sit alongside Roman tunics, elegance collides with dirt and vomit, and actors drift across film sets like fallen gods. Sequins, latex, and monumental architecture have rarely looked this striking together. In “Roma Elastica”, the boundary between reality and cinema proves as fragile as a strip of celluloid running through a faulty projector. Tales of cinema legends intertwine with anecdotes about excrement hidden in a woman’s handbag.

Mandico leads us through this delirious world with his trademark audacity. Every scene feels as though it has been dreamed up by an obsessive devotee of 1980s Italian cinema, then unleashed upon the world after an endless, drug-fuelled orgy.

The director of “The Wild Boys”, “After Blue”, and “She isConann”, already well known to Splat!FilmFest audiences, once again proves that compromise is not in his vocabulary. “Roma Elastica” is at once a horror film, a romance, a comedy, and a science fiction movie. One moment it dazzles with visual beauty, the next it repulses with grotesque imagery, while the film as a whole moves between an exquisite homage to European cinema and sheer madness.

Mandico has never assembled a cast quite this impressive. Oscar winner Marion Cotillard stars as Eddie, alongside Noémie Merlant and Italian cinema legends Ornella Muti and Franco Nero. Each seems to have wandered in from a different film, a different era, a different world. And somehow, that is precisely what makes it all work.

“Roma Elastica” is no conventional tribute to cinema. It is a love letter written on the back of an old movie poster, scented with powder and cigarette smoke.