"(...) Mastroianni is back, thank God ! He's the joker in this multi-level tale, this absurd parable. Handsome, charming, warm-hearted and astute, he takes on different disguises, always different yet always himself. (...) The skill of Mastroianni's performance, in this procession of carnival figures, lies its sheer discretion in a situation where he could easily pull out all the stops. "Three Lives and Only One Death" reveals the imperial (imperialist ?) power of fiction. But it's the simple truth of its main actor that gives it its power and best moments."
(J-M Frodon - Le Monde)

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In his second-to-last role, Marcello Mastroianni stars as a husband, a professor, a butler, and a businessman in Ruiz’s light-hearted, Borgesian salute to fantasy life and the telling of tales, arguably the director’s most accessible and commercially successful film involving the complete destruction of narrative. Here a radio announcer begins one story, which is then continued by another character, who begins to tell another tale, and so on, with each tale getting increasingly stranger and more delightful. Absent husbands, invalid mothers, professors of “negative anthropology,” good-hearted prostitutes, naïve young lovers, and random side-jokes abound (“Don’t let Carlos Castaneda come between us!” shouts one character, several times), but all are united by a ever-winking, liberated-looking Mastroianni and the surrealist trickery (both visual and narrative) of Ruiz, at the top of his game—and here, thanks to Mastroianni’s involvement, with a budget to match.

© Jason Sanders, bampfa.berkeley.edu