Roma Elastica (Fantastic Fest 2026)

Not, as Britons of a certain age may expect, a film about Justine Frischmann and the gang touring Italy, Roma Elastica is the latest film by Bertrand Mandico. If the name is unfamiliar, that’s no surprise. Mandico is one of the most unique, surprising and consistently entertaining voices in queer cinema right now, but his films rarely get British distribution. He’s adapted William S. Burroughs in The Wild Boys and crafted a loving short-film tribute to Walerian Borowczyk in Boro in the Box, a jaw-dropping fantasy in which the late Polish animator, pornographer and genius is reincarnated as a box with a peephole in it. His last film, She is Connan, was a gender-bending, copyright-disregarding homage to Robert E. Howard. His work is similar to Nicolas Winding Refn in its Eurosleaze high style, but without the somnambulant pacing; shorts like Islands, meanwhile, suggest a French version of Guillermo del Toro who is both queer and even hornier for monsters. The very least you can say about these descriptions is that they’re intriguing. So why aren’t we getting these films over here?

One answer might be a lack of star power. If so, this is a deficiency his new film, Roma Elastica, sets out to correct. The story of an actress and her personal assistant unravelling during the shooting of a 1980s Italian sci-fi film, it has a supporting cast full of familiar faces for fans of the era it’s pastiching. It also has two very famous names at the top of the cast list, in the shape of Marion Cotillard and Noémie Merlant. The question of why we don’t have proper movie stars any more has a lot of plausible answers, but here’s one people don’t consider enough: we don’t have enough writers and directors who know how to craft iconic roles for them. Roma Elastica shows that Mandico, despite his previously non-starry casts, does not suffer from this affliction. The film introduces Merlant with a worshipful pan up from her stylish shoes to her outrageous bleached-white haircut, and defers the reveal of Cotillard’s face for maximum impact.

Cotillard and Merlant don’t need Mandico’s help to be iconic, of course, but it’s still been a long time since I’ve seen a director relish the challenge of writing grand diva roles like this. If you only know Merlant from her performances in Portrait of a Lady on Fire or Tar, you may be unaware of what a joyous goofball she can be; her uneven but likeable directorial work is proof of this. Here, she achieves the hitherto-impossible and steals the film from Cotillard. Her PA, Valentina, is almost as much of a science-fictional creation as anything in the film Cotillard’s Eddie is starring in, elegant and weird but also capable of sudden shocking acts like biting the arm of an over-familiar Vogue Italia journalist. Of course, Cotillard is no slouch either. Talking movies with the droog-like gang of scenery painters staying in her apartment, they discuss Isabelle Adjani in Possession, and sure enough Cotillard gets her own version of the subway scene that’s become such a touchstone among modern horror fans. Mandico being Mandico, he soundtracks the convulsions with a gentle Peggy Lee version of ‘Me and My Shadow’.

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Roma Elastica is the kind of film that’s always flagging up its reference points just as you recognise them, which is something you’re either going to find funny or annoying. I have to say it kept making me laugh; the description of the film-within-the-film as “like Antonioni remaking Escape from New York” is second only to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma‘s “Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain” as 2026’s best film pitch. Like Schoenbrun’s film, the period detail is a destabilising mix of the uncannily right and the deliberately wrong, producing the haunting quality of a dream or a hazy memory. It has a fannish glee in bringing figures like Ornella Muti and Franco Nero out for cameos, but its nostalgia is subservient to the serious business of depicting Eddie’s collapse.

How serious is the serious business? Not wholly, but somewhat, would be my answer. Mandico’s films are always deeply entertaining even when they’re at their most inscrutable, and Roma Elastica is no exception. As soon as she gets off the plane from France, Eddie is booked onto a chat show hosted by the aforementioned Muti where dancers dressed as classical statues cavort behind her. The tacky absurdity of it all gets a big laugh, but Eddie’s disorientation is as uncomfortable for the audience as it is for her. Later she goes to a party, where the Felliniesque excess is much more pointed; an older actress attends in monster make-up, noting that “with age you have to stay out of sight – that’s what my agent says”. The film opens with Zlatko Burić, the veteran Croatian actor who recently had a plum role as the dictator of Boravia in James Gunn’s Superman, mocking Eddie for demanding a bonus to go topless in a movie. The question of whether Eddie is being exploited is therefore seeded in the audience’s mind from the start, but she has a different perspective on it. During the conversation about Possession, she’s asked if she would ever have sex with an octopoid monster on screen as Adjani did for Żuławski. She says it would depend on the script – or, to use Eddie’s exact words, “if the act fits the purpose”.

The act that actors have to simulate more often than sex is, of course, death, and death becomes an increasingly prominent theme as Roma Elastica goes on. Franco Nero’s character says he likes to keep working because “film-making is an antidote to old age”, but he can afford to say that – he’s a director. For Eddie, acting is a series of rehearsals for her death, and this is half the reason why Roma Elastica maintains an emotional power underneath its thick skins of artifice, cleverness and ridiculousness. The other half is the relationship between Eddie and Valentina, which follows David Lowery’s Mother Mary in presenting a relationship which may or may not be romantic but is certainly close to the point of codependence. As cartoonish as the characters can be, you absolutely buy them both as people who’ve been there for each other throughout a whirlwind of situations as extreme as this, and Cotillard and Merlant’s portrayal of this bond successfully shines through the film’s postmodern excess. Somehow, the vital connection is made.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – ROMA ELASTICA