IN PARIS - At the Champo on rue des Ecoles - Ghost stories - Random Restorations of films by Dino Risi and Fritz Lang

Romy Schneider, Marcello Mastroianni, Fantasma d'Amore

A selection of films featuring Marcello Mastroianni screening at Le Champo in rue des Ecoles revealed a host of titles seen plus one totally unknown, Fantasma d'Amore (Ghost of Love) made in 1981 by Dino Risi, somewhat out of character for a director whose forte is comedy and speedy narratives. Mastroianni plays an academic of some kind whose orderly life is interrupted by a woman (Romy Schneider) who races after a bus he usually doesn't take and then keeps turning up in his life. She's a former lover and he slowly becomes entranced with her all over again. Except she's not what he and at first we think she is...he is summoning up a ghost of a relationship and getting deeper and deeper into the fantasy.... Its formulaic and seems to be some sort of derivative of Dont Look Now. A quick check of the internet reveals that the film seems to have disappeared after its first release but now, after a superb restoration, it may be getting some recognition via Mastroianni tribute seasons. 

The Testament of Dr Mabuse was Fritz Lang's second crack at Mabuse and Le Champo is screening a superb digital copy with both astonishingly good picture and sound. A title in German only at the start of the film explained I think the various iterations of the film's duration, 3300 metres+ when it premiered in Budapest. An excision of 500 metres or so shortly thereafter and the length of  the reconstructed version. I think. Released in 1933 it resurrects Mabuse as a ghost able to malignantly influence the course of human history by unleashing sheer terror on the population. I think. There are so many character strands that connecting the dots is a bit difficult. It was the last film Lang made in Germany before his exit for safer pastures first in France for Liliom and then on to the States for the next two decades. Le Champo is screening the film as part of a German Expressionism season alongside The Blue Angel, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Pandora's Box, M and Metropolis.