I don't usually write about documentaries, because most of them belong under the rubric of reportage rather than art. To be sure, most feature films, too, fall very far short of art, generally aspiring only to be popular entertainments, and failing even at that. Clearly outclassing the current copycat, featureless feature films, however, is the documentary Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember, by Anna Maria Tatò, whose name the press kit misspells Tató, which admittedly is nothing compared with the film's misnaming one of Mastroianni's favorite childhood movies as Flaying Down to Rio. Still, flaying alive might not qualify as excessive punishment for many in today's movie business.

Marcello Mastroianni (1923-1996) was a great film actor. It was not his fault he was dubbed "The Latin Lover," something he inveighs against in I Remember. Rightly so, for in several of his most important films he was not a lover at all: as the teacher-turned-labor-organizer in The Organizer (1963), a naïve youth shyly in love in White Nights (1957), a member of a gang of thieves in Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), the caring older brother in Family Diary (1962), the impotent husband in Il Bell' Antonio (1960), the homosexual lusted after by Sophia Loren in A Special Day (1977), and several others. Even as the aging, lame Casanova of Ettore Scola's That Night in Varennes (1982), he is playing merely a human being, and no one in the movies has ever been more human than Mastroianni.

His was a startlingly handsome face that aged gracefully into a rueful palimpsest, where reading between the heavy lines of the present one could still discern the flawless alabaster past. When, as here, the posture has become slightly stooped, the walk somewhat hesitant, the viewer grows aware of his own aging. For we do not notice the tiny incremental stages of our own senescence, but in the sudden, shocking decrepitude of a movie idol we see our own mortality more truthfully than in any mirror. As I Remember moves freely forward, backward, and sideways, we get a fine perspective on Marcello's, our own, and everyone else's lives, and surely 200 minutes is not too long for a seminar on living.

Besides a ballooning wife (pasta, not helium) whom Marcello finally shed, there were well-publicized lovers such as his leading ladies Faye Dunaway and Catherine Deneuve, on whom he fathered the surprisingly unattractive and untalented actress-daughter Chiara. Could his then newly married co-star Brigitte Bardot also have been on the roster? In I Remember, he sings — or croaks — the famous Mozart aria about the number of Don Giovanni's conquests, and even his poor singing is not without charm. Conversely, his dancing, including the tap we see here, was good, except when, as in Fellini's Ginger and Fred, it was meant to be amateurish.

Anna Maria Tatò, a filmmaker and Mastroianni's companion for the last 22 years of his life, made this documentary in Portugal, where Marcello, then 73, was in his final movie, Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1996), directed by the 88-year-old Manoel de Oliveira. (Despite his age, Oliveira had "an irritating amount of energy," Mastroianni says. "I felt like his grandfather.") It is a poor film (as I would have expected from that inept director), but Marcello brightens it considerably. Although the questions Tatò asked for I Remember were agreed upon beforehand, the answers were neither scripted nor rehearsed: only one camera, and always only one take. The result, with intercut sequences from Marcello's films (some of which were unseen in the U.S.) and a late stage appearance, is spontaneous and enchanting.

This was a man intelligent, witty, modest, honest, and charming to his fingertips &3151 ah well, that was Marcello's only blemish: stubby, unaristocratic fingers. Fellini was well aware of them, as Marcello and he (Fellini makes several brief appearances) duly noted; the director even tried to lengthen them with plastic extensions. In the end, he took them as they were, as he also did what he jokingly called his star's "country-bumpkin face." He would tell his cherished cinematographer, Giuseppe Rotunno, who shot this film too, "Make him handsome! You must make him handsome!"

(Mastroianni took this sort of thing with a humility unknown in today's Hollywood. "He was right when he used to say, 'Make him handsome,' or 'make her beautiful,'" he said of Fellini, "because the actor is a hyphen between the filmmaker and the audience.")

I remember the dinner at Mastroianni's house on the fabled historic Appian Way to which the director Lina Wertmuller took me one evening. The food was delicious, our host delightful. I particularly recall his taking us around his art collection, including several discolored rectangles where paintings used to hang. "This was a Vespignani," Marcello would say with a shamefaced smile, "gone to pay the tax man."

In the movie, too, while musing about the absurdity of American actors turning their profession into something painful and tormented, he observes that this makes sense only if you are in arrears with tax payments or out of work. He compares acting to the cops-and-robbers games of his childhood: "This profession is marvelous. You are paid to play games, and everybody applauds. Of course, you need a little talent. But what more could anyone ask for?"

Against lively, shifting Portuguese backgrounds — mountains, rivers, the shady bench and table in front of a country inn — the actor reminisces, reflects, makes graceful confessions, but without revealing any indiscreet details about himself or others. He is totally free of envy or malice, never mentioning the names of mediocrities he worked with on some of his 170 or so pictures, but always full of admiration for all sorts of people, including such rival leading men as Vittorio Gassman and Gian Maria Volontè. Gassman, in fact, secretly coached him out of his stage fright when both acted on the stage in Alfieri's Oreste for the sternly demanding Luchino Visconti. Gassman also had to drag the frightened novice out of the toilet, where nerves made him pee continually.

The actor claims to be not one for books, although quotations from Proust, Stendhal, Diderot, Kafka, and Chekhov come easefully to his lips. He hates TV ("Could it be old age, or is television really cretinous?"), except for old movies and documentaries about animals, but not fish or birds, which bore him. And there are sweet little anecdotes. Just once, Marcello's beloved younger brother Ruggero, a fine film editor, acted with his star sibling in a dismal historical movie about Scipio the African, a scene from which we see here. As always, Mamma Mastroianni caught the finished film, and commented, "Well, Marcello, you were wonderful as usual, but the redhead [Ruggero] was better."

Or the time when the 19-year-old Marcello, on an absurd wartime journey with no lights allowed on a blacked-out, hopelessly crowded train, was suddenly passionately kissed. "I never knew whom I kissed. But I am sure it was a woman — though I don't know whether she was pretty or ugly. How many years have passed? And yet that moment is still present, truly, one of the most intense memories of my life. Memory is bizarre, isn't it? Bizarre like love."

Thus speaks the self-disclaimed Latin Lover but indisputable charmer. No wonder that, as we see in the film, busloads of tourists would briefly stop by that villa on the Via Appia. An offscreen voice says, "I know the Americans. First they go to the Coliseum, then to the catacombs, and then they come here to 'Mastroianni! Mastroianni!' And he's got to show his face." And speaking of shown faces — and bodies — another recurrent presence here is his frequent co-star, Sophia Loren, especially endearing in a striptease she performs for Marcello. To quote that happy man, "What more could anyone ask for?"