'Scarlet': a beautiful handmade fable by Pietro Marcello

2023-04-14T10:36:33.922Z

The director of 'Martin Eden' composes in his new film a story about a carpenter and his daughter that refers to cinema and history as a craft

Scarlet (L'envol)

opens with archive footage from the end of the First World War.

Just a few seconds of an old colored negative serve Pietro Marcello as a visual and narrative prologue to his new film, a fable about the power of manual labor —to overcome adversity, to transmit values.

Set in rural France between the wars, it is based on the Russian tale

Red Sailboat,

by Alexander Grin, whose quote about "the miracle" of one's own hands opens the film.

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Marcello, the most exciting of the new Italian filmmakers along with Alice Rohrwacher, shot this film after his adaptation of Jack London Martin's novel

Eden,

in which the director, trained in Naples and forged in documentary, led fiction his romantic fervor as a film archivist and archaeologist and demonstrated the evocative capacity of a language made of old celluloid scraps.

Shortly after, Marcello directed the documentary

Para Lucio,

a very interesting investigation into the singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla, to later embark, already in a pandemic and in France, on the film that is now being released after inaugurating the Cannes Directors' Fortnight a year ago.

Full of deconstructed children's literary references —from good and lonely witches and monsters to petty villagers to the myth of

Beauty and the Beast

or Little

Red Hood—,
Scarlet

is also a song (literally, since the film also has a lot of musicality) to that visual plasticity of celluloid that denies us digital neatness.

The story of a carpenter father who returns from the war to find himself a widower with his little daughter will gradually transform into a fairy tale in which the father, played by Raphaël Thierry, is a man whose rough and rough appearance hides his delicate nature.

In his gross hands grows not only a beautiful girl (incarnated as an adult in the magnetic debutante Juliette Jouan) but all kinds of toys and coffered ceilings capable of rebuilding the scars of a story that starts with men returning from the mud of the Great War.

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With a cast that includes the marvelous Noémie Lvovsky as matron-witch-fairy, and Louis Garrel as aviator-Prince Charming, Scarlet falls short of

Martin
Eden

's height

but does radiate a comforting vibrancy.

In his profound humanism, Marcello films over and over again the hands of his characters, rough hands, delicate hands, hands that play work or musical instruments, that bury themselves in the face or in the ground and that, above all else, They transmit knowledge.