25/03/2010

You’re a film star. You died in 1996. You’ve always been a shy and private person. Yet someone, without your permission, uses your image to advertise cars.

This is what happened to Marcello Mastroianni, "star" since March 14 of a commercial for Citroën, created by the Paris-based agency H. The great Mastroianni is in good company: John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe are also promoting the new Citroën DS3 on screens across Europe in an advertising campaign conceived as "anti rétro".

The Lennon commercial shows the musical genius in an interview, certainly not automobile related, stating that the time has come to change and start something new. While his fans have protested, Yoko Ono says she accepted Citroën’s offer in order to keep Lennon’s image alive for new generations.

The Mastroianni ad, shown only in Italy, went one further. The actor says the sentence: "I can’t understand this desire to redo the past…. Old myths, old scripts – to see the same old film? Do something new, live life, now!" Words never spoken by Mastroianni but simply reconstructed by a dubber, the eclectic singer Bobo Rondelli.

The information supplied by the press office of Citroen Italia does not indicate the provenance of the images (it seems like an old interview) and who gave them the right to use them. However, an article published in Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera states: "Director Anna Maria Tatò, Mastroianni’s companion the last 20 years of his life, allowed the images of the Italian ‘Latin lover’ to represent this anti retro philosophy, which also inspired his lifestyle".

Everything is in order. Thanks to this ad, in which Mastroianni involuntary stars, we thus know more about the "lifestyle" of one of the most beloved actors of Italian and international cinema. Yet didn’t Roland Barthes write that "cars are the gothic cathedrals of our times "?

(Translated from Italian)