★ 8 / 10
The life of a working actor
HotToastyRag
Anyone who wants to become a famous actor or actress needs to watch Salut l'artiste. You need to be prepared for the best case scenario of your career. The…
Anyone who wants to become a famous actor or actress needs to watch Salut l'artiste. You need to be prepared for the best case scenario of your career. The odds are one in a million (or perhaps less) that you'll become a "movie star". If you actually "make it", you should know what that looks like. Making it doesn't mean you're Meryl Streep. Making it means you're a working actor, and as anyone in the business will tell you, a working actor is extremely respected. In this French drama, Marcello Mastroianni plays as a working actor. He goes on auditions on weekends, he acts onstage in the evenings, and he's on different film sets during the day, as extras, walk ons, and bit parts. He has to endure terrible treatment from directors, snobby behavior from the leads, and humiliating requests, all in a notoriously unpredictable environment. His show can close, he can get fired and replaced with another extra, or the work can dry up, at any given moment. But he goes to work every day and does what he loves: he acts. And he pays his bills entirely from acting. No one knows his name, no one recognizes him on the street, but when you're in show business, Marcello's career is a success.If you're not, never have been, and never will be, in show biz, it's fascinating. You might not know what it's like to go to work every day as a working actor. You might have seen a couple of All About Eve-types that show you what the rich and famous go through. But the anonymous fellow who goes on ten different film sets in one week lives an entirely different life. It's so interesting to see Marcello in different costumes, with elaborate makeup, playing a soldier, boxer, fisherman, you name it. We see him recording cartoon voices, doing minor stunt work, trying several character interpretations for a director who eventually just tells him to do it without a mustache, running errands on his lunch break dressed in 1600s garb, and all with a smile on his face. His two best friends, Jean Rochefort and Francoise Fabian, are also working actors, but they have different attitudes about their work. Jean is a bit jaded, and Francoise is fed up, but Marcello loves it. He loves his work. His only sorrows come from the occasional fight with his ex-wife and son; his professional life is wonderful. He's painfully aware of all the crow he has to eat in order to keep working, and all the lousy treatment he has to sweep under the carpet, but he loves going to work in the morning. If there's anyone who watches this movie and feels sorry for him, that he's approaching middle age and voicing a pig cartoon, they don't get the point of the story.
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★ 10 / 10
The Ultimate Comedy About The Life Of The Actor
tonstant viewer
It is a crime that this film is not available on DVD. It should be required viewing for anyone considering becoming an actor. This comedy is painfully acute on…
It is a crime that this film is not available on DVD. It should be required viewing for anyone considering becoming an actor.
This comedy is painfully acute on the subject of the million humiliations a working actor must face. Marcello Mastroianni and Jean Rochefort are both superb in playing second-raters who will never achieve stardom, and who scramble desperately to hold their lives together in the precarious world of showbiz.
Neil Simon's "The Goodbye Girl" has dated badly, but "Salut l'artiste" remains as pointed and relevant today as when it was released. This is a much better film.
Now for that DVD......
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80%
AUDIENCE
6.2/10
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