Scarlet (2023)

Direction: Pietro Marcello
Country: France / Italy / other

Following the critical acclaim of Martin Eden (2019), Italian director Pietro Marcello, who moved to Paris in 2020, has a hard time giving a meaningful expression to Scarlet, failing authenticity. His newest film is a gorgeously photographed but inept screen adaptation of the 1923 novel Scarlet Sails, one of the most known by Russian author Alexander Grin. 

In the aftermath of the First World War, Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry), returns to his small rural village on the Picardy coast, to learn that his beloved wife died suddenly, leaving him a little girl called Juliette. Madame Adeline (Noémie Lvovsky), the farm owner who raised the girl, accepts him as a handyman. The years go by, not without difficulties. One day, Juliette (Juliette Jouan is a revelation) finds love, when an adventurous pilot (Louis Garrel) descends from the sky. 

Scarlet doesn't melt, but it drifts. Oscillating between historical realism and moony tale, the film still arouses some early curiosity that, unfortunately, doesn’t last long. Numerous plot holes and gray areas make it hard for us to get attached to the characters. Lacking nerve, this inefficiently executed story never reaches the required emotional power to work as a whole. 

The film’s musical parts are inconsequential and, for their brevity, ludicrously whimsical; the pedestrian romance is without passion; the sixth sense and witchcraft suggestions feel like jokes; and the archival footage - with colorized and sepia frames - creates a completely redundant, even distracting tonal mishmash. The cinematography by Marco Graziaplena is your best bet, but it’s on the bottom that this film sins.

Martin Eden (2020)

Direction: Pietro Marcello
Country: Italy

Told with an interesting, old-fashioned-style charisma and counting on the crisp acting skills from Luca Marinelli and Jessica Cressy, this hooky cinematic version of Jack London’s 1909 novel Martin Eden exudes political turmoil and dramatizes a passion-fueled yet ill-fated romance marked by social inequalities.
Marinelli, winner of the Volpi Cup at Venice Film Festival, plays the title character with zeal, outlining an individual personality that changes drastically with the time. 

Martin Eden, a penniless brave sailor with a knack for words, decides he wants to be a writer shorter after he meets Elena Orsini (Cressy), an elegant upper class young woman with whom he instantly falls in love. The relentless man becomes self-instructed, writing about the world of sadness, addiction and despair that he knows so well, but employing a raw, incisive style that doesn’t please the aristocrats. He then befriends Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi), a socialist poet who owns a local newspaper, and his ideas become centered in individualism rather than the collectivism that unites slaving workers against greedy bosses. Naturally, such a rebellious behavior causes a painful rupture in his relationship with Elena. Despite the success of his literary work, Eden feels helpless to prevent that loneliness, doleful sarcasm and perpetual bitterness take possession of his next stage of life. 

Writer/director Pietro Marcello, who is also a documentarian, opts for a cheesy soundtrack, but compensates with a compelling storytelling and stalwart imagery, driving us into the strange lyrical world of a character, who, straddling between two different worlds, never vacillates in the purpose to be true to himself.

Hence, if you go for the romance, prepare yourself to be engulfed by a socio-political context that turns out as poignant and merciless as the love story itself.