‘Roma Elastica’ review: Marion Cotillard anchors fractured, excessive Italian 1980s drama

Dir: Bertrand Mandico. Italy. 2026. 107mins

Dreamy decay haunts the latest feature from French filmmaker Betrand Mandico, which charts cinematic decline as well as nesting reflections on the follies of youth within an ageing actress who is physically reaping what she has sown. Mandico’s excess all areas approach may not be for everyone but Marion Cotillard’s fully committed performance at the heart of Roma Elastica has just about enough magnetism to pull the film back from the unruly brink. 

Cotillard has just about enough magnetism to pull the film back from the unruly brink

With films including She Is Conann (2023) and The Wild Boys (2017), Mandico has always been more interested in stylistic cohesion than harmonious narrative. He now presents a film within a film – with flickers of a life within a life. The surreal and heady 1980s-set psychodrama premieres in Cannes Midnight sidebarand is likely to pick up a lot more slots at that hour on the festival circuit, especially with an eye-catching cast that includes Cotillard, Noemie Merlant and, in supporting roles, Isabella Ferrari, Ornella Muti and Franco Nero.

Set in 1982, the film stars Cotillard as Eddie Mars, an ageing star who is losing her lustre and who realises her past is catching up to her in the form of a brain tumour diagnosis – there’s a sense that it’s not just her character on a schlocky US set that feels she has been “betrayed by my youth”.

The cancer news arrives just as Eddie is about to head to Rome, accompanied by her make-up artist and confidante Valentina (a slicked back peroxide blonde Merlant, who previously featured alongside Cotillard in 2023’s Lee) to take a role in a black-and-white science-fiction feature set in 2026. Mandico has some fun with that concept, making one of the directors of the project a medium who can see into a future where “a man with straw on his head” is president, among other things.

The role Eddie will be playing is of a trashy 1980s nature; a far cry from the golden age of Italian cinema, and Mandico cheerfully leans into the silver sets and cheap effects. The costuming, from Pauline Jacquard, perfectly evokes the sharp and angular styling and colour schemes of the eighties catwalks.

Sculpture is a repeated motif, frequently appearing in the back of scenes or at the film studio – although most of these carefully chiselled bodies are missing heads or limbs, while elsewhere heads exist without torsos. The apartment Eddie is given as part of the contract is also unfinished, so that everything around her seems to be mirroring her own sense of personal apocalypse. An Eraserhead badge perches on the lapel of the jacket she wears through most of the film; a nod to David Lynch, whose Mulholland Drive echoes throughout this story of mental breakdown.

Things really start to slide after a chorus of leather biker jacket-clad set designers, who are staying in the neighbouring flat, bring drugs into the mix. As Eddie increasingly loses touch with reality in her off-hours, the film also fragments, with some moments inevitably more memorable than others. One significant interlude involves a manifestation of Eddie’s younger self, who appears like a janus. Nicolas Eveilleau’s camera stays with Cotillard, ensuring the intensity of mood never slackens even when the narrative becomes slippery.

The score from Pierre Desprats is shot through with classical and modern additions, from Bach’s ’Toccata’ and ’Fugue in D minor’ and Tchaikovsky’s ’Nutcracker’ to Peggy Lee’s dissolute take on ‘Me and My Shadow’. Lee also gets the honour of the final say; as she sings ‘Is That All There Is?’ over the final credits, it feels like a Mandico punchline for those who may not have been won over by his world – as well as a challenge to remember our own mortality.