THE STORY – 1982. Eddie is an actress who has had her moment of American glory. Accompanied by Valentina, her loyal makeup artist, she accepts the lead role in a science-fiction film being shot in Rome – a film that could very well be her last.
THE CAST – Marion Cotillard, Noémie Merlant, Alba Rohrwacher, Ornella Muti & Maurizio Lombardi
THE TEAM – Bertrand Mandico (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 107 minutes
“Roma Elastica,” the latest film from the provocative, fantastical director Bertrand Mandico, opens with a powerfully simple but gripping scene. Told to hurry out of her dressing room for the next shot, film actress Eddie (Marion Cotillard) receives a devastating phone call about her health. In one long take, she stoically receives this news, walks into the dingy hotel room set, and delivers an over-the-top monologue to a tied-up, blood-covered man on the bed. Cotillard, unsurprisingly, is powerful in this scene, leaping quickly into the high emotional stakes, clearly supported by the upsetting revelations of which her character has only become aware immediately before shooting. Unfortunately, this is the only moment in the film with any logic, humanity, or care for the audience’s experience. After Eddie finishes her scene, the film immediately clicks into the intensely obnoxious, consistently idiotic gear that drives it for the rest of its runtime. This shift is made clear by the fact that one of the scenes that follows shortly features her partner, Valentina (Noémie Merlant), telling Eddie in graphic detail about a highly distressing bathroom incident she had at a fancy party. Mandico never lets up on his brazenly unpleasant filmmaking and screenwriting, only made worse by the fact that he has no interest in approaching anything resembling sense in the story being told.
Eddie travels to Rome to shoot her next movie, a sci-fi film set in the year 2026. Its story is being conjured up in real time by a medium named Leila (Martina Scrinzi), who lets viewers’ present-day predictions guide the plot and details (references to TikTok, YouTube, and the Trump presidency are tossed off in something that’s clearly supposed to resemble humor). Centered almost entirely on the preproduction process of this movie, “Roma Elastica” follows Eddie as she wanders from spot to spot in Rome, meeting eccentric crew members and bizarre strangers, all the while not so much reckoning with her doomed existence as ignoring it.
There’s no distinction between the strangeness of the film Eddie is making and the one that we in the audience are watching about Eddie. The world of “Roma Elastica” bends away from normalcy as a flower leans toward the sun. Thus, there’s no foundation from which to base the film’s tone, no standard set against which we can measure the wacky events on a weirdness scale. The film is a soup overly seasoned with so much spice and flavor to the point where it becomes totally distasteful.
Mandico overloads his frames with absurd imagery that offers no insight into either the story being told or what he intends viewers to take away from it. It’s poorly-aped Fellini, using images that shock and even upset, but at least the Italian master had a perspective behind his occasional surreality, even if it wasn’t always obvious. Here, characters float in and out of scenes, delivering their lines with intentional overlapping levels of disinterest in such a way that they seem intended to be ignored; the one singular moment in the film that got a genuine laugh from me was when one new character breathlessly introduces herself with “Hi, Eddie, I’m Pupi, I’ll be your assistant in the movie.” At least this actress makes a different choice than those around her. “Roma Elastica” is a dumb film trying to be smart, but instead loops back around to being dumb.
It’s not just the environment around Eddie that repels the audience’s investment; it’s also Eddie herself. There’s no “in” to Cotillard’s character, no foothold for those watching her journey to steady themselves with that gives her a feeling of humanity, or at least something close to it. And given that the very first thing we learn about her is that she’s likely going to die young, one would think that Mandico would want those spending time from their one precious life watching his film to feel any emotion about her. Cotillard doesn’t help (and, on the other hand, the film doesn’t help Cotillard), spending the entire film stumbling around with her eyes roaming aimlessly, giving the impression of a long, disinterested sigh. She’s not surprised by anything she encounters, no matter how crazy. Because the character (and perhaps Cotillard herself) doesn’t care about anything, with her illness serving as neither something that she’s shaken by nor something that she’s pointedly running from, it’s hard to care about her at all in return.
If anything nice can be said about the film, it’s that it’s at least always interesting to look at. The sets are creatively designed, and Mandico keeps both the camera and his cast moving actively through them. And most fascinatingly, everyone in the film wears the same costume for nearly the entire length of the film, which spans several days for the characters, almost as if it’s a uniform. It’s a theatrical touch that’s welcome in the otherwise tedious endeavor.
When they enter the disgusting apartment that will serve as Eddie’s home-away-from-home during the shoot, Valentina says, “It smells like death.” To this, Eddie morosely replies, “Like me.” This trite bit of writing is presented without a hint of irony, highlighting the film’s amateurish execution. “Roma Elastica” is a cinematic triumph only in the sense that it achieves something seemingly paradoxical: it’s aggressively loud and obnoxious yet totally boring and, if we can be so lucky, forgettable.
