de facto film reviews 3 stars

A triumphant return to the rich aesthetics and enchanting artistry of Martin Eden, Scarlet is Italian director Pietro Marcello’s second narrative feature to grapple with Europe’s past. The film unwinds with some pokey pacing but achieves some emotional and visual grandeur along with some emotional payoffs that make it a compelling piece of cinema. While a step back from his adaptation of Jack London’s classic 1909 book titled Martin Eden, Scarlet still impresses with its exquisite cinematography and a satisfying third act where the human drama ends up satisfying in spite of the film’s uneven tonal shifts and melodramatic detours.

Just as the filmmaker’s 2020 masterpiece, Martin Eden, captured pre-World War II Italy, where we saw glimpses of the rise of Italian fascism conflicting with the Communist revolution of that era, Marcello’s latest film is once again a period piece with a luminous setting that is every bit as much an evocation of a historic era, that being post-World War I-era France, as experienced by a very small group of individuals within a small rural French village trying to grapple with daily life struggles on the rural countryside.

Scarlet Courtesy Kino Lorber

What felt like a cinematic breakthrough with Martin Eden was just how Marcello adapted a classic film and made the whole material feel refreshing. For starters, the film transported the viewer back to an era, and Marcello utilized super 16mm film stock, in which he also used archival footage to establish the setting. Yet with all of these archaic methods and tools, it felt revelatory, and to this date, I stand by the statement that Martin Eden was one of the most accomplished films to be released in the U.S. in 2020.

Marcello utilizes similar aesthetics and tools in Scarlet, a Carl Dreyer-style period piece about a young woman raised by her ailing and depressed father during the aftermath of World War I. The setting, along with the super 16mm cinematography, gives the film a very ravishing tone with the scope and tone of a novel. The film also holds elements of magical realism and rich intimacy that eventually rescue the film from feeling too dry or dramatically inert, which is sadly belabored by these minor shortcomings in the opening 30 minutes or so. Pacing aside, Marcello holds the audience’s attention with innovative juxtapositions and an involving romance, and he effortlessly explores the hardships people within communities endured in the aftermath of the First World War.

Scarlet (2022) Movie Review from Eye for Film Courtesy Kino Lorber

Marcello’s latest takes creative liberties with a wide array of various approaches. There is a mixture of magical realism with realism, and even when the love story feels tacked on, the young protagonist, Juliette (Juliette Jouan), ends up developing a relationship with an older pilot, Jean (Louis Garrel), who crashes from the sky and onto the farm. It ends up being the most engaging aspect of the film. Marcello even does some genre-bending with the film, as he wedges some musical numbers throughout the second act of the film as if it were out of a Jacques Demy musical.

When the film isn’t as sweeping with romance, it has a more distressing subplot that involves Juliette’s ailing father, Raphael (Raphael Thierry). He arrives at the farm after years of being sent off to battle, and as his health declines, he does his best to shy away from it. He discovers that he is now widowed after his wife died, and Julietta has been raised by the local proprietor, Adeline (Noemie Lvovsky). Raphael is very rough around the edges, a man with a strong work ethic who also holds a warm-hearted side. While his age and pain may prevent him from getting carpentry work, he stays persistent and keeps his head up. Eventually, he lands a carpeting job in the village. Meanwhile, he ends up finding that the local village cafe owner holds a dark past of raping Raphael’s wife as he was off in combat, which helps build up some of the film’s tension and build up some effective scenes in the film that hold some tragic results.

Scarlet - Kino Lorber Theatrical Courtesy Kino Lorber

Marcello’s approach might not always work; some of the film veers off with ineffective melodramatic detours, and some of the pacing feels sedated, along with the tone. Where it does work is in how the rural lifestyle is captured in the artistic eye of Marcello, who makes the 1920s French rural lifestyle feel so transportive. The film has a woozy impact that makes you feel as if you are in someone’s woozy daydreams. He shows how people in that lifetime aimed to escape the hardships of that time. Whether it’s the small details of Raphael building small wood toys and sculptures in between his carpentry or his daughter rushing off to the fields to fantasize and yearn about a better life, this is all thanks to Marcello and cinematographer Marco Graziaplena, who together employ their rich tools of grainy 16mm film stock, natural light, landscape cinematography, and an endless number of other intoxicating images. All around, Scarlet is quite an emotional involvement, one that’s a meditation on fantasy, regret, trust, and love, and the agonies that period brought to ordinary people.

SCARLET opens in limited theaters Friday, June 9th.