Scarlet (Pietro Marcello, 2022) (Patreon)

After seeing three of his earlier films, Pietro Marcello finally made sense to me with Martin Eden. Not only was in anchored by a brash lead performance by Luca Marinelli; its literary roots provided the strong narrative and thematic bones that I felt were missing in his previous feature film Lost and Beautiful. So perhaps Scarlet is a step back, or maybe Martin Eden was a bit of a fluke. Too soon to tell. However, just as Lost and Beautiful's commitment to commedia del'arte rendered that film a bit too abstract, Scarlet adopts a broadly mythic style that kept me at arm's length.

Set just after the end of World War I, Scarlet is in part a film about small town insularity and prejudice. While most of the men in Scarlet's northern French village seem to have sat the war out, Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry) did his duty and returns home as a bit of a shell. He learns that his beloved wife died while he was away, and he is now responsible for raising an infant daughter on his own. But Madame Adeline (Noémie Lvovsky), a village outcast and self-professed witch, informed Raphaël that his wife was raped by the local bartender (François Négret), and she was so traumatized that she stayed out in the rain and contracted pneumonia. Raphaël, a skilled craftsman but a man of few words, tries to get revenge.

Despite the righteousness of his cause, Raphaël is shunned by the townspeople, who see him as a reminder of something they'd all rather forget. This ostracism extends to his daughter Juliette (Juliette Jouan), who grows up to be a beautiful and intelligent woman devoted to the art of singing. She is a Belle figure beset by one particular bête (Ernst Umhauer) who also happens to be the bartender's son. She rejects his advances and falls for Jean (Louis Garrel), a wayward pilot who signifies escape from the smothering town.

None of this is communicated through character. Rather, Marcello operates in the schematic, even predictable manner one might expect from a fairy tale. Scarlet runs almost entirely on atmosphere, which itself is rather familiar from pre-Nouvelle Vague French cinema and the various attempts to revive it. More than anything, Scarlet reminded me of another romantic pastiche, Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement. The layering in of documentary footage from the period, something Marcello accomplished to great effect in Martin Eden, feels a bit more perfunctory here, as if the director wanted to keep a toe in the experimentalism of his early work while making something much more conventional. Given that this is Marcello's first film in French, I suspect he relied a bit too much on previous models, which is a shame. Even when I'm not on Marcello's wavelength, I appreciate his originality, and in Scarlet that unique vision is in short supply.