Le Voyage de G. Mastorna ・ Comédie-Française

Marie Rémond is practised in the art of weaving a fiction from heterogenous materials, creating here, in collaboration with Thomas Quillardet, a production based on a film dreamed of by Federico Fellini.

A project he described as the most important in his life and which he elevated to the status of myth. At the height of his glory, when he had just shot 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits, he threw himself into this “metaphysical thriller”. There is something of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the odyssey of Giuseppe Mastorna, an internationally renowned cellist who becomes the victim of an airplane accident and finds himself in a sort of limbo city, a baroque and nightmarish afterlife. Unable to prove his identity, “he has lost the most authentic meaning of life”, explains the Italian director, who submits his “double” to a series of Kafkaesque tests.
Marie Rémond draws from the multiple traces left by the director: his script-synopsis written in collaboration with Dino Buzzati and Brunello Rondi, a documentary made on the location of the first screen tests, and a comic strip created with the cartoonist Milo Manara. As in her memorable Comme une pierre qui... [Like a Rolling…] at the Studio-Théâtre in 2015 in which she already reflected on the act of creation, through the figure of Bob Dylan in this case, she transforms the stage of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier into an artist’s studio, making it at the same time an intimate space, a zone of discussion and conflict, and an area in which to play with the actors. The incredible plot of the Voyage de G. Mastorna thus combines with the story of a film plagued by monumental costs – the producer Dino De Laurentiis sued his filmmaker friend for a reimbursement –as well as the tale of a cursed work, a man who doubts life and art, and a director’s excessive identification with his character and fetish actor Marcello Mastroianni.

NEW PRODUCTION
Staged in a bifrontal device

Creative team

Directed by : Marie Rémond
Translation: Françoise Pieri
Adaptation: Marie Rémond, Thomas Quillardet and Aurélien Hamard-Padis
Scenography: Alban Ho Van
Costumes: Marie La Rocca
Light: Jérémie Papin
Sounds: Dominique Bataille
Film : Avril Tembouret
Make-up and Hairstyling: Cécile Kretschmar
Artistic collaboration****: Thomas Quillardet

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