For better or worse, there’s no one doing it like Bertrand Mandico. Of all the directors pulling into Cannes with Marion Cotillard and Noémie Merlant riding shotgun, only Mandico leaves you wondering if he’ll have actually made a film. He makes features all right, alongside shorts, music videos, installations, and experimental theatre that are all, in many key respects, form and length agnostic. All are pure showcases for the artist’s baroquely wrought aesthetic — sometimes little more, and sometimes that’s enough.
Just take that caveat emptor as you head for Rome.
Still, “Roma Elastica” holds together better than most, owing for the most part to its positioning as a star vehicle for Marion Cotillard. The French actress is a scream as a dying scream queen heading to the Eternal City for one last shoot. Even when struck with an aggressive brain tumor, Eddie (Cotillard) knows how to make an entrance. Somewhere in the southwest, in 1982, she emerges from her trailer with alabaster skin, azure eyeliner, and bright red lipstick, her very face the French flag. She then struts onto the set of a Z-grade horror movie where she promptly executes Zlatko Burić, who already has “pig” written on his forehead in lipstick and is soaking in a pool of blood. Now, cut!
Eddie’s assistant, make-up artist, and only friend in the whole wide world, Valentina (Noémie Merlant), waits nearby with booze, pills, and moral support after the actress receives bad medical news. There’s no time to dwell, though: Rome beckons, promising one last stab at screen immortality. Both actresses are clearly having a ball playing off the residual screen personas. Cotillard all but picks up where she left off as the icy diva in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s “The Ice Tower,” only more emaciated, aviator-shaded, and sporting an “Eraserhead” pin; while Merlant neatly fuses her assistant from “Tár” with the libertine gusto of “The Balconettes.” You might notice a trend.
Even before they board the overnight to Italy — each seat fitted with its own decaying marble bust holder, like a sybaritic European riff on the sword gag from “Kill Bill” — the game is clear. Never trying for cogency, “Roma Elastica” is a kaleidoscope of riffs and references, playing out less as a direct narrative than as an IYKYK meme, or a neural-network prompt to cross Lucio Fulci with syphilitic late Fellini. It’s the kind of film that crests on a Franco Nero cameo — playing a director slumming it on some misbegotten shoot, dispensing gems like “filmmaking is the antidote to old age” — and makes you feel that This Is Important, whether or not you can place Franco from “Django.”
That suits the director perfectly well, for Mandico’s theatrical background gives him a penchant for immersive spaces over bravura shots. He composes sets of deliberate artifice, full of rear projection, grotesque designs, and actors pitched to high camp, and then drifts his camera through them. His films are meant to leave impressions.
They might also drive you mad. Once Eddie and Valentina touch down in Rome, they head immediately for a gaudy talk show hosted by Ornella Muti and staffed by no small number of carnival grotesques — most notably a man painted white beneath a rubber ape mask, who insists to Eddie that he must simply eat her ass. “That’s such bad taste,” exclaims Valentina. But that’s just Lamberto, up to his old tricks, and Mandico too.
Less scenes than set pieces, these sequences are often defiantly non-narrative, with Eddie herself frequently as bewildered as the audience. We move from talk show to cocktail party to Eddie’s flat, each stop pushing new riffs through the kaleidoscope to diminishing effect. The film’s standout moment, tellingly, turns down the volume and the Fellini-intensity. Cotillard is placed before a mirror with a rubber face protruding from the back of her head, and simply turns and turns and turns to “Me and My Shadow.” She lets loose, gets freaky, and flexes her star power.
Of course, Mandico never deviates from his style. He’s most at home on a soundstage, making artifice his materia prima. Eddie has come to Rome to shoot a so-called “Escape from New York”-inspired erotic cannibal peplum — only feminist — so it should come as no surprise that the film-within-a-film offers no change of pace. At the same time, Mandico can also be pretty funny when he turns down the intensity, and he lands a great laugh when we learn the premise: its set in the distant future of 2026, where ecologists face off against neo-fascists, and people travel around in single-use transportation funnels called YouTubes.
Mind you, the filmmaker did venture further afield for this one, shooting on actual Roman locations — and, naturally, back in the studio at Cinecittà — lending the film some interesting texture. “Roma Elastica” doesn’t subtly overlay an over-the-hill movie star with a city that decisively peaked two millennia ago, but the point still lands. Even diminished, both still endure; and even death throes can be made eternal when captured on screen by an idiosyncratic auteur.
Grade: C+
“Roma Elastica” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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