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Salut l'artiste ("Hail the Artist") opens with a jarring comic juxtaposition: Marcello Mastroianni, as King Louis XVI, strolls the stately halls of the Palace of Versailles. Then he lights a cigarette and makes a phone call. We soon realize that he's a movie actor on a break between takes.
Salut l'artiste has plenty of that sort of droll humor, but it is also much more than that. Mastroianni is Nicolas Montei, a hack actor who barely ekes out a living going from one humiliating, ridiculous job to the next. He and his partner, played with great good humor by Jean Rocheforte, race to the theater every night just in time for their entrance, whereupon they are both promptly shot and killed. Then they hustle to their next gig, in a strip joint, as the comic illusionists The Mysterious Boys. Half the time their employers can't even come up with the money to pay them.
Montei, like so many, is addicted to this disheartening, unremunerative existence. (We can't help but wonder: was Mastroianni himself making a sly commentary about the profession that made him so rich and famous?) Montei's home life is no better. An inveterate womanizer who can't commit to anyone, when he's with his mistress he longs for his ex-wife, and vice versa. As his mistress tells him, "You have an act for everyone, all of them bad. You're nobody for nobody." What's amazing about this film is that the immortal Mastroianni is utterly credible as a mediocre actor whose life is a sad sham. He looks uncomfortable in his skin; his famous good looks hang on him like an ill-fitting suit. This bittersweet comedy stays in one's thoughts long after the credits roll. (The haunting harmonica theme is by virtuoso Toots Thielemans.) --Laura Mirsky
