The international critical acclaim that accrued to Pietro Marcello’s ambitiously complex Martin Eden is unlikely to be repeated with Scarlet, the Italian director’s first French production and a peculiarly precious work for a filmmaker best known for his accessibly intellectual bent. Set in the period immediately following World War I, the movie tells of a returning soldier who raises his daughter with the help of a woman farmer, all of them outcasts from a village of distrustful peasantry. Largely composed of short scenes with little sense of rhythm to connect them, Scarlet indulges in a visual and aural daintiness unexpected for Marcello, who delivers uneven characterizations accompanied by Gabriel Yared’s cringingly treacly score. A few top-name Francophone stars will draw French audiences but wider distribution will be a challenge.
Marcello’s feel for integrating archival footage with newly shot scenes was one of the highlights of Martin Eden, and here too he proves his mastery with images of returning soldiers processed to recall the stencil colors of the era, which meld into d.p. Marco Graziaplena’s initially muted tonalities. Thick-featured Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the silent-era actor Louis Wolheim) arrives at a farm in Picardy in search of his wife Marie, only to be told by proprietor Adeline (Noémie Lvovsky) that she died shortly before, leaving an infant daughter, Juliette. Amidst the devastation of the post-war landscape, Adeline struggles to keep her large property going, inured to the villagers’ mistrust but welcoming Raphaël as a fellow outsider.
As a master carpenter it would stand to reason that he’d find work in the battle-scarred neighborhood, yet Raphaël’s position in the village is tenuous, made more difficult when he discovers that pub owner Fernand (François Négret) raped Marie, who subsequently froze to death. With nowhere else to go and sustained by Adeline’s good-heartedness, he chooses to raise Juliette at the farm, scraping a living by carving wooden toys which he sells in town. The household’s strong female presence, thanks to Adeline’s charismatic earthiness, is a good atmosphere to raise the young girl, though she’s bullied at school and accused of witchcraft.
Marcello sporadically incorporates elements of magic in the story, playing on the idea of women of the soil connected to special powers derived from a pre-Christian identity. Not just Adeline, who dabbles in fortune telling and is a healer, but a local madwoman played with overindulgent broadness by a stereotyped Yolande Moreau, who predicts that a ship with scarlet sails will come and sweep Juliette to another land full of marvels. The notion catches the young girl’s imagination, so when as a young woman (Juliette Jouan) she encounters Jean (Louis Garrel), a handsome pilot with mechanical troubles, she imagines he’ll whisk her away once she’s ready to go.
Garrel’s character is maladroitly shoe-horned into the narrative but even more clumsy are a few musical numbers in which Juliette sings (fortunately Jouan has a pleasant voice), for example by a riverbank in a scene meant to recall Jacques Demy but trying so hard to be charming that it falls completely flat. In the end it’s difficult to know exactly what about the source material, Aleksandr Grin’s Alye parusa (Scarlet Sails), captured Marcello’s imagination: hard-drinking Raphaël is a potentially intriguing character but we only fitfully get glimpses inside his persona, while Juliette’s mix of independence and freshness generates likability without depth. Adeline is the most satisfying figure thanks entirely to Lvovsky’s projection of a tender yet occasionally fierce nurturing warmth. The few side characters introduced are so sketchily drawn that it feels the director had little investment in their presence, which contributes to the sense of one scene following another with little emotional build-up.
Most exasperating, because they’re so out of character for the director, are certain saccharine visuals, like sunbeams shining on wildflowers, that would be more appropriate in a 1970s shampoo commercial. Combined with Gabriel Yared’s sickly sweet incidental music, they dissolve the potentially interesting social commentary into a cloying, ill-defined broth of unappealing consistency.
Director: Pietro Marcello
Screenplay: Pietro Marcello, Maurizio Braucci, Maud Ameline, in collaboration with Geneviève Brisac, loosely inspired by the novel Alye parusa (Scarlet Sails) by Aleksandr Grin
Cast: Juliette Jouan, Raphaël Thiéry, Noémie Lvovsky, Louis Garrel, Yolande Moreau, François Négret, Ernst Umhauer, Suzanne Marquis, Asia Bréchat
Producers: Charles Gillibert, Ilya Stewart
Co-producers: Michael Weber. Viola Fügen, Antonio Miyakawa, Olivier Père
Cinematography: Marco Graziaplena
Production designer: Christian Marti
Costume designer: Pascaline Chavanne
Editing: Carole Le Page, Andrea Maguolo
Music: Gabriel Yared
Sound: Erwan Kerzanet, Bruno Reiland, Olivier Guillaume
Production companies: CG Cinéma (France), L’avventurosa Film (Italy), RAI Cinema (Italy), Match Factory Production (Germany), Arte France Cinéma (France), ZDF with the participation of ARTE (Germany), Les Films du Losange (France), in partnership with Hype Film, Wise Pictures, Cinémage 16, Cinéaxe 13
World sales: Orange Studio
Venue: Cannes (Directors’ Fortnight)
In French
103 minutes
