free Italian adaptation of Green’s story
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“Scarlet Sails” by Italian Pietro Marcello, a very free film adaptation by Alexander Greene, in which only dreamers survive, is being released in Russia. And they die too.
The World War is over, and the lame, crippled, tired soldiers return home to the dawning twentieth century. Rafael, a carpenter, hobbles into his village past children playing war. His wife did not wait for him – but the circumstances of her death will become known to him later. But there was a daughter left, little Juliet. The girl is raised by her evil-tongued but kind-hearted neighbor Madame Adeline, Rafael works part-time at a shipyard – until, by coincidence, he becomes an outcast. Then he begins to make wooden toys and take them to the city to sell. Juliet grows up, her classmates hate her, and all she has left is music (her father restored and tuned a dilapidated piano), poetry and dreams. She believes the tales of the local madwoman: that one day a handsome prince will fly for Juliet in his plane with scarlet sails. And the prince arrives.
Yes, this is a film based on Alexander Greene’s extravaganza, a film rooted in the early twentieth century, too dark to be a fairy tale (although there is a Toad Queen, and an obvious reference to Pinocchio, and songs, and dances, and sick people being treated conspiracies), too free from genre blinders to be a musical or a love story, too far removed from the radiance of Greene’s text. Therefore, you can never say where this plot will fall or rise, who is waiting in the bushes and what awaits the girl in an open field on a warm summer evening.
This genre uncertainty can be perceived as authorial clumsiness or, conversely, delightful indifference to the opinions of fellow cinephiles. The Italian Pietro Marcello, a self-taught documentarian, gives his “Scarlet Sails” an epigraph from Greene: “…to do so-called miracles with your own hands.” And he makes the film an example of such handmade work, now and then diving into his favorite archival cinema, now and then emerging into a musical, filming with a shaking hand camera both violence and leaves eaten by worms (more precisely, there are two cameras, one of the operators is Marcello himself).
The good people in “Scarlet Sails” are those who know how to do something with their hands, the bad ones are those who don’t know how and therefore want to open a cafe or tavern. Perhaps the main characters of the film are the hands of the carpenter Raphael, heavy, old, capable of precise work. Adeline heals with her hands. Juliet works woodwork and also plays the piano – the film is perfectly suited to the music of Gabriel Yared, who always manages to be old-fashioned and at the same time not boring, as evidenced by his Oscar for the score for Minghella’s The English Patient. The musical numbers, by the way, made critics remember Jacques Demy’s “Donkey Skin,” but, fortunately, in “Scarlet Sails” the music is not woven into the plot, it simply gives the characters a break. War, post-war poverty, hatred of fellow villagers – all that remains is to either wait for the scarlet sails, or talk to the witch, or sing.
This is by no means a romantic love story. A love story – of course: parental love, love of independence, love of poetry and music, love of handicraft, love of freedom; all the good people in “Scarlet Sails” are outcasts, dreamers, loners. Juliet’s romantic interest only appears in the second half of the film, falling, as predicted, from the sky. Louis Garrel in the role of Prince Charming, an adventurer pilot, is painfully reminiscent of Borat – Marcello is sure that with this film he killed the very idea of a handsome prince. For Green, Assol was the “best cargo” and “best prize” of the ship and its captain, for Marcello the prize was this downed pilot, Juliet kisses him first, she will still think about whether she needs him.
The director admits that after the “masculine” “Martin Eden” has now made a distinctly female, feminist film, a film about a girl for whom her dream is more important than her husband, and freedom is more important than rules. In the debutante Juliette Juan he found ephemerality, fearlessness and strength at the same time. “If you are a girl, be a thousand times braver than a boy,” sing Juliet and her friend – and, judging by the film, this is exactly the situation. A thousand times braver, a thousand times smarter, a thousand times more independent. Men know how to drink, drown and rape; the best of them also tune pianos and fly airplanes. Women have to do the rest.
It’s not for nothing that Marcello cast the iconic ladies of French cinema in the role of two witches: actress, screenwriter and director Noemie Lvovsky, who played for Arnaud Desplechin, Bertrand Bonello, Roman Polanski and Maiwenn, and Yolande Moreau, whom everyone remembers from “Amelie”, but her best She played the role in the wild asocial comedy of Kervern and Delepin “Louise-Michelle”. Louise Michel is a French anarchist, revolutionary and feminist of the 19th century, and it is to her poems about the swallow that the heroine of Scarlet Sails, Juliet, composes music. Because in a patriarchal society, thinking about heaven, singing songs, saving frogs and refusing to open your own cafe is anarchy, revolution and feminism. Green’s Assol is a “living poem”; Marcello knows this poem. “Swallow” says that breathing requires “air and freedom.”
In Marcello’s film La Belle et Lost, Pulcinella led a bull through documentary and archival Italy. In the documentary “The Silence of Peleshyan,” Marcello enthusiastically examined the principle of “remote editing” of the great director Artavazd Peleshyan, who reinvented the laws of cinema and the laws of the Universe. In Martin Eden, archival footage—streets, people, time—stitched together the entire twentieth century, or rather, turned it into a blurred background for those who remained on film.
“Scarlet Sails” must be watched at least for the amazing episode when Raphael (Raphael Thierry) – gloomy, overgrown, as if knocked together from crooked wood – travels by train to the big city. The view from the train window suddenly gives way to archival footage of the railway, music rolls in, now the street of a big city is visible, some people stop and smile directly at the camera – and, emerging from this sepia hole in time, Raphael, almost a double of Balabanov’s Trofim , freezes at the window of a toy store.
“Scarlet Sails” once again proves that for Pietro Marcello there is no connection between reality and cinema, reality and newsreels. In reality, you will never be shown the same frame twice. In reality, music almost never starts when someone is arguing. In reality, people who no longer exist do not walk with a hasty, funny step and do not look straight into your eyes. For Marcello, archival footage does not exist to emphasize “truth,” historical truth, but, on the contrary, to take the film beyond the boundaries of history, to where eternity is. Where is the air and freedom.
In theaters from March 7
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