Review: Pietro Marcello's "Scarlet" is a picture out of time

by Cláudio Alves

Whether documentary or fiction, Pietro Marcello's films always convey the quality of artworks lost somewhere between modernity and an undefined past. 2019's much-lauded Martin Eden took this aspect to its peak, evoking the palpable authenticity of Neorealist cinema while playing fast and loose with history in its design. That film's relationship with the past circumvents reactionary nostalgia. The anachronistic scenography suggests an atemporal milieu, breaching the porous membrane separating the narrative's period and the viewer's sense of now. This further underlined the piece's political gestures, turning retrospective into a direct address. In comparison, Scarlet represents a more conventional object though it shares many qualities with its predecessor. 

Like Martin Eden, Scarlet is a literary adaptation looking back to Europe in the first half of the 20th century. The raw material is Alexander Grin's 1923 novella Scarlet Sails, once brought to the big screen by Soviet filmmaker Alexandr Ptushko. In Marcello's film, the Russian setting is transposed to rural Normandy…

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The Furniture: "Martin Eden" and Designing Outside of History

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Jack London was befuddled by the reception of Martin Eden. He intended the novel to be a sharp critique of individualism and was surprised when the public took his protagonist as something of a libertarian hero. Though as J. Hoberman points out in his extremely perceptive reading, the novel is more of a “tragic celebration” than a bitter condemnation. And perhaps the “misreading” of an antihero is always inevitable, the unintended seduction of an unexpected contingent of the audience.

This tension has followed Martin Eden into the 21st century. Pietro Marcello’s new adaptation moves the story from California to Italy and places it outside of time, replenishing some of the aesthetic mystery that is inevitably lost when a novel is cast, shot and projected onto a screen. The production design helps, contributing to the atmosphere at both high and low registers. 

Martin Eden begins, in part, as a love story. Martin (Luca Marinelli) is a sailor who falls for Elena Orisini (Jessica Cressy), the daughter of a wealthy liberal family...

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NYFF: Luca Marinelli is "Martin Eden"

Murtada Elfadl reporting from the New York Film Festival

How does a mercenary go about feeding off others? In particular an emotional mercenary. One who feeds on all those around him, particularly women, so that he can grow and thrive. Such is Martin Eden the eponymous character in Pietro Marcello's film which recently won TIFF's Platform award and the Volpi Cup in Venice for Best Actor. The film starts when Martin (Luca Marinelli) saves a young man from a bully and is taken in by his bourgeois family. At the time he is an uneducated labourer who gets by doing small jobs...

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