Scarlet Review: Pietro Marcello’s Magical Realism Is a Vague Celebration of the Past

Pietro Marcello’s Scarlet begins with an epigraph as simple as it is profound: “You can do so-called miracles with your own hands.” This quotation, taken from Alexander Grin’s 1923 novel Scarlet Sails, from which Marcello’s film is loosely adapted, points to one of the work’s key motifs: the hands that Raphaël (Raphaël Thierry) puts to uses both dexterous and delicate, from playing the accordion to cradling his newborn child. But most of all, Raphaël—a widowed woodcarver who returns home to a small village in the north of France after returning from World War I—uses his impressive hands to ply his trade, performing the minor miracle of transforming a chunk of wood into a ship’s mast or a children’s toy.

The film’s emphasis on Raphaël’s literal handiwork is echoed in the extraordinary tactility of its images. Shot by cinematographer Marco Graziaplena on luminous 16mm stock, Scarlet is, in its finest moments, a purely sensory experience, one which imbues the simplest of objects—rustling leaves, a half-empty glass of beer, and the turning pages of a book—with a palpability that’s stirring. As he did in Martin Eden, Marcello interpolates archival footage into the fabric of Scarlet so seamlessly that one can’t always tell what’s old and what’s new.

Marcello’s Pagnolian vision of French provincial life, so full of art, music, poetry, and idylls in the woods, is ultimately a show of romanticization, one that at times suggests the farmhouse fantasies of the cottagecore crowd. Marcello heightens this sense of pastness by rounding the edges of the frame, which lends the entire film the feel of an old postcard. But while Scarlet’s world may not be strictly realistic, it’s brought to life with such rich, rough-hewn poetry that it’s hard to resist getting swept into its idealized vision of life in the country.

Unfortunately, the beautifully rendered rustic milieu turns out to be considerably more enticing than its underfelt, overwrought, and jaggedly episodic dramaturgy. Scarlet opens promisingly enough: Raphaël returns from combat after being discharged to find that his beloved Marie died in childbirth, leaving a newborn daughter in the care of unmarried farm owner, Madame Adeline (Noémie Lvovsky), who takes him into her home. The two form a tender but platonic relationship as Raphaël learns of the disturbing circumstances leading up to Marie’s demise. As Raphaël attempts to find his place among the not-always-inviting townspeople, the film has a charming, if dark-toned, simplicity that complements its pastoral backdrop.

Roughly a third of the way through its runtime, though, Scarlet shifts focus to Raphaël’s daughter, Juliette (played at age five by Suzanne Marquis, at 10 by Asia Bréchat, and as a young woman by Juliette Jouan). It’s at this point that the film—which was co-written by Marcello, Maurizio Braucci, and Maud Amelin, and in collaboration with Geneviève Brisac—becomes increasingly episodic and stylistically variegated, making brief forays into the realm of musicals, folk tales, and magical realism without committing to any of these forms.

Juliette is told by a witchy, woods-dwelling fortune teller (Yolande Moreau) that she will one day be whisked away by a ship bearing red sails to a distant land where dreams can come true. That mystical premonition serves as a breaking point in Scarlet—Juliette jumps forward in age within the scene—and it sets the stage for the film’s latter half, in which the young woman grows more and more dissatisfied with the limitations of provincial life. The filmmakers infuse these scenes with a nervy restlessness that recalls Martin Eden, but whereas in that film we were given deep access to its protagonists hopes, dreams, and bitter resentments, here the actual substance of Juliette’s yearnings remains frustratingly vague. She at one point sings that she wants freedom, but what exactly that means to her is frustratingly unclear.

Scarlet’s only concrete answer to this question comes in the form of a dashing pilot, Jean (Louis Garrel), who literally falls out of the sky one day to sweep Juliette off her feet. The two share a brief, intense love affair that ends just as abruptly as it begins—and then later reignites even more precipitously, but it’s premised on little more than mutual attractiveness and is devoid of any specificity that would give it meaning. If this romance is meant to proceed with the airy illogic of a fairy tale, it instead comes off as leaden, unconvincing, and fundamentally at odds with the pseudo-feminist gloss that the filmmakers attempt to slap on Juliette’s story.

Making good on the promise of the epigram at the film’s beginning, Scarlet closes with a miracle, but it’s sadly just as clunky and inorganic as the rest of the film’s detours into the fantastic. This final moment of fabulism embodies the paradox at film’s heart: Having established such a textured, tangible world in its opening passages, Scarlet bafflingly spends its remainder breaking more and more from that richly established world. Ultimately, the film drifts so far into vague, weightless fantasy that it practically dissipates before one’s eyes.