Co-writer/director Pietro Marcello is going for something very specific with Scarlet, an adaptation (of sorts) of Alexander Grin’s novel Scarlet Sails, set in a time of war and uncertainty. The characters are broadly defined, from a father’s hulking brusqueness, to a daughter’s radiant beauty, to the unabashed heroism of a strapping and handsome pilot. The story unfolds over the course of two decades, as the backdrop of the years between the two World Wars provides something of a fable about the father and the daughter, who find themselves on very different life paths than the father saw for either of them. Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry) returns home from the war to find an infant daughter and a dead wife, and 20 years later, Juliette (Juliette Jouan) is being courted by suitors all through the town square.
Two decades is a lot of ground to cover within any sort of story treatment, and unfortunately, Marcello and co-screenwriters Maurizio Braucci and Maud Ameline betray any sense of scope within this tale, especially in the way an entire, crucial portion of Juliette’s growth from a young girl to a young woman is skipped over at precisely the point where it was becoming interesting. Jouan is a born star onscreen, but the whole of the film’s second and third acts are taken up by Juliette’s romantic pursuits, interrupted only by visits from the town mystic (Yolande Moreau), who informs her that her fate, at least, is a promising one – under the very specific circumstance of seeing scarlet sails at the moment she might be rescued. Eventually, she meets a dashing young man named Jean (Louis Garrel) who could offer that chance.
Thiéry is gruff and quite good in the role of Raphaël, whose hardened face and cold blue eyes soften into a helpful, gentle soul (spending his days taking care of a farmer’s widow, played by Noémie Lvovsky, who tended to his daughter in infancy) who nevertheless cannot quite shake off the old ruthlessness of his war days. His wife died under mysterious circumstances – possibly due to childbirth while having Juliette, but potentially some other way, involving the man with whom she found herself involved after her husband was away for so long. Raphaël finds his revenge upon the violator in a certain way that winds up spelling doom for his reputation in this small town, so fragile at any signs of trouble that even the befitting punishment of a very bad man is enough to fracture its ecology.
Marcello imbues all of this with an old-fashioned visual language, uninterested entirely in commercial or mainstream impulses, filming everything in the boxy Academy ratio in order to close us into this representational world. There are musical and magical-realist interludes, hints at the supernatural at work in the background of this utterly human story, and those interludes only work to distance us from the emotional impact it is meant to have. The aesthetic strengths of Scarlet are quite clear, and if a movie could get us far enough on those attributes alone, filmmaking would be an easier game to play. As is, however, this is a movie that winds up saying a lot less about these characters and this period in history than it intends.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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