With its fluid movement through time and space as well as a playful, disturbed and intelligent protagonist whose eccentric behavior subverts social custom, the 1921 Luigi Pirandello play naturally found its way into Bellocchio’s adept hands. A trickster even within a band of tricksters, the intense young “Henry” baffles his fellow Renaissance reenactors—and eventually has a psychological breakdown. Years later, holed up in a cavernous castle, he still lives under the delusion that he is the excommunicated Henry IV, the 11th-century Holy Roman Emperor, and is surrounded by a coterie of players who keep him imprisoned in delusion, yet liberated from the chaos and responsibilities of modern reality. Masterfully played with restrained madness by Marcello Mastroianni, Henry lives perpetually within a shoddily produced tragic comedy—with its own rules and anachronisms within anachronisms. Meanwhile, the group of friends who instigated his dementia are suddenly set on curing him, and enter this hall of socio-psychological mirrors where the protections of identity, self-delusion, masks and roles turn inside out. By the postmodern conclusion, Henry and his various collaborators share in the experience of the endless simulacra where perhaps the true self has finally been lost.