(by Alessandra Baldini) (ANSA) - NEW YORK, 04 DEC - "Martin Eden" by Italian director Pietro Marcello enters the "top ten" of the best films of 2020 compiled by New York Times film critics Manohla Dargis and AO Scott.
Dargis puts "the brilliant adaptation of Jack London's eponymous novel" at the top of her hit parade, which includes SpikeLee's "David Byrne's American Utopia", Radha Blank's "The Forty Year Old Version" and Kantemir's "Beanpole" among others. Balagov.
Published in 1909, London's autobiographical novel has always been more popular in Europe than in its author's hometown and Marcello's version for the screen is "at the same time a burning love letter and a brazen act of cultural appropriation and imaginative ", writes Scott who positions the film with" insanely torrid "Luca Marinelli in fourth place in his ranking after the sequel to Borat (in his opinion" undeniably the most 2020 film of all time ")," City Hall "by Frederick Wiseman second on par with Romanian Alexander Nanau's "Collective", and Kelly Reichardt's "quasi-western" "First Cow".
Shot in 2018 in Naples and selected last year for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Marcello's film has not yet been released in the US, but it can still be viewed on Kino Marquee, a virtual platform created in time for Covid. .
In the film, which won Marinelli the Coppa Volpi for best actor, Marcello transplants the character of the London novel's adventurous sailor from California to Naples and "gives him the entire twentieth century as a backdrop for his ardor and ambition", observes Scott. : "Literature, politics, class struggle, sex - it's all here, concentrated in a seething epic that continually surprises and erases any distinction between realism and fantasy".
The tribute to Marcello is the second in these days of criticism from the New York Times for Italian cinema: last week Dargis and Scott had put Toni Servillo in their hit parade of the 25 best actors of the twenty-first century for his interpretations in the "Divo" and "They" by PaoloSorrentino.
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