Even those unfamiliar with the work of Roberto Rossellini should get something out of Guy Maddin’s haunting and memorable short film My Dad Is 100 Years Old, which plays as a sort of personal exorcism for its writer and star Isabella Rossellini. It’s not a document of the great Italian director’s work (the only clip used is from the oft-excerpted Rome: Open City) so much as the younger Rossellini’s reconciliation with her father’s mystique. To her, he is a towering figure, represented here by a comically blubbering torso that argues with several famed figures from cinema past (all played by Isabella). Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, David O. Selznick, and Charlie Chaplin weigh in with their ideas about the art of motion pictures, while Ingrid Bergman expounds on her tempestuous relationship with Roberto, which begat both Isabella and a powerful series of films (Stromboli and Voyage to Italy among them). The actress is never presumptuous in how she inhabits the short’s many roles and she even “directs” its most emotional scene, interrupting an in-character reverie to decry an ostentatious and manipulative crane shot that she feels does a disservice to her father’s ideals.
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