Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello, 2019) (Patreon)

Pietro Marcello is a director who, for me, has been hovering in the "interesting" zone for quite some time. The work I have seen from him up to this point has suggested that he might produce something that would touch a nerve with me, but somehow I could not find my way in. Of his last three films, I was most intrigued by his documentary about Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian (The Silence of Pelesjan, 2011), while his previous film, the Commedia dell'Arte influenced Lost and Beautiful (2015), struck me as the most impenetrable.

Even though Marcello's ample talent was evident from the work I had seen, I was unprepared for the gut-punch of Martin Eden, his adaptation of Jack London's 1909 novella. Moving the action to Italy between the wars, Marcello has created a portrait of a working class would-be intellectual who is virtually defined by his opposition to all established positions. He is not an aristocrat, but he also finds Bolshevism vulgar and reductive. He aspires to be a man of letters, and reads voraciously, but is a stubborn autodidact, unwilling to accept the dictates of a formal education. His eventual mentor is a socialist, but he rejects socialism as well, occasionally flirting with fascism, but not in any serious way. And, while he desires true love, he rejects it once he becomes worthy of it.

The generation of such a character is, of course, a high wire act, since there is every threat that he will come off as a petulant, insufferable know-it-all. Martin Eden guards against that at virtually every turn, mostly due to the astonishingly vulnerable performance of Luca Marinelli in the title role. Resembling an elongated, somewhat battle-scarred Jake Gyllenhaal, Marinelli conveys the swagger and bravado of Martin Eden with a tragic undercurrent. It is not just that we continually watch as he blithely destroys his every chance at happiness or security, out of fear or misplaced pride. Marcello and Marinelli also show us that he is still, beneath it all, a nervous country bumpkin, prone to mispronouncing words or using the wrong fork at dinner. His failure to fit in, in time, becomes an explosive refusal to fit in, a rage against a social order that he thinks looks down on him. (In this regard, Martin Eden is an indictment of liberal "tolerance," showing how fascism can take root simply by pretending to understand the lower classes and offer them a place.)

As his perennial foil, the discontented aristocrat Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy) offers him love and acceptance almost immediately, but this is never quite enough for Martin. Marcello is wise to leave certain aspects of their relationship uncertain for the viewer. For instance, when she wants Martin to write differently, or conduct more formal study, is it because she looks down on him, seeing him as a project for improvement? Or is she really just making the sorts of reasonable demands that any prospective wife would make of her husband -- knuckle down, get a job, listen to editors, don't be a dilettante? Martin always presumes the former, making their cross-class romance impossible.

All signs in the narrative point to Eden's eventual failure as a writer, which makes it something of a curveball when, in the third act, he has actually become a literary phenom. Playing a bit like a more serious rendition of Hal Hartley's Henry Fool, this conclusion finds Eden achieving success in direct proportion to the vituperation and contempt he hurls at his readership. A scene in which a half-drunken, slovenly Martin delivers a guest-rant at an American university is particularly potent, as it demonstrates the ideological corner into which the man has painted himself. When railing against everything and everyone becomes your "brand," there is essentially nowhere left to go. Only by securing his own misery (and finally, his own demise) can Martin retain a shred of integrity.

Unlike so many "well-appointed" period pieces, Martin Eden employs highly unusual formal means to create the distance between its world and ours. In addition to Marcello's use of grainy celluloid throughout -- high praise is due to cinematographers Alessandro Abate and Francesco di Giacomo -- the director inserts tinted passages of historical stock footage from various moments in the Italian century. This provides not just a concrete location in time and place, but connects Martin Eden to cinema history, and the history that cinema has made.  Marcello, clearly aware of the cinematic avant-garde, tips his hat to the archival found-footage films of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, whose reassemblage of Italian documentation of colonialism, violence, and fascism have served to examine the specific role that cinema itself has played in these conquests.

Martin Eden would make a glorious double-feature with another experimental character study, Marco Bellocchio's Vincere. In both films, we witness the crisis of Italian modernity, its political and psychological incoherence, the ways in which social strife and class consciousness bear down on the masculine psyche. As Marcello shows us, in the proper historical circumstances, even the most committed renegade will discover that he is, in fact, a conformist.