2024 Top Ten List #6 Scarlet (L’envol)

 

Director Pietro Marcello

Russian writer Alexander Grin

SCARLET (L’envol)              A                                                                                                     aka: The Flight                                                                                                                               Italy  France  Germany  (100 mi)  2022  d: Pietro Marcello

Swallow coming from the stormy cloud,                                                                               Faithful swallow, where are you going? Tell me.                                                                       What breeze carries you away, wandering traveler?                                                                  Listen, I would like to go away with you,

Little swallow, far away, far away from here, to immense shores,                                         Towards barren boulders, rocky shores, deserts.

—excerpt from Les Hirondelles (The Swallows) by exiled anarchist writer Louise Michel, 1861, Hirondelle - YouTube YouTube (2:25)    

This often subtle and charming film has an old-school look and feel about it, dark, slow, and contemplative, with undeniable formal beauty, initially feeling like a cross between Terrence Malick and Bruno Dumont, where the lead male protagonist has such a uniquely primitive look about him, physically imposing with a craggy, ravaged face like he lives in a cave, the kind of raw, subhuman figure Dumont loves to find, while the sublime poetic elegance can feel cinematically transcendent, yet the real surprise comes when the female protagonist breaks out into song, recalling the the breezy, sophisticated charm of Jacques Demy or Christophe Honoré’s DANS PARIS (2006), LOVE SONGS (2007), La Belle Personne (The Beautiful Person) (2008), Beloved (Les Bien-Aimés) (2011), and On a Magical Night (Chambre 212) (2019).  A depiction of an almost archaic rural world, a reflection of a simple life and the magic of nature, the film announces the gradual disappearance of this world, where there is a longing for love, for art, but also a distinct recognition of a past.  The first film not in his native Italian, characters here speak French, where a primary concern is overcoming rigidly set social barriers, paying tribute to rejected artists from the past whose spirit the director resurrects. Premiering in the Director’s Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, with a screenplay by Marcello, Maurizio Braucci, Maud Amelin, and Geneviève Brisac, the film is a reshaped period fable adaptation of Scarlet Sails, the 1923 romantic fantasy novella of Russian writer Alexander Grin (Alexander Grin. CRIMSON SAILS), a rejected and heavily censored artist who died in extreme poverty (the director studied in Moscow), opening with the epigraph, “You can do so-called miracles with your own hands.”  Set in the aftermath of WWI, using vintage 16mm documentary footage of the destructive wreckage, a limping war veteran Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry, a French visual artist, painter, sculptor, and illustrator) wearily returns home from the frontlines, where we quickly discover he is a widower whose beloved wife died not long after childbirth under horribly tragic circumstances involving someone in the village, leaving behind an infant daughter named Juliette.  Among the many pleasant surprises in this film is the appearance of French director and screenwriter Noémie Lvovsky, an actress with the most nominations for the César Award for Best Supporting Actress with seven, whose lighthearted, dialog-driven French comedies FORGET ME (Oublie-Moi) (1994) and LIFE DOESN’T SCARE ME (1999) were among the best French films of the 90’s.  She appears here as the impoverished widow Adeline, a feisty older woman on a rural farm in Normandy who has been taking care of Juliette, bringing loads of personality into the role, giving her the lively effervescence missing from the more downbeat Raphaël, a glum man of few words who walks like a lumbering giant, but he’s a woodcarver with a unique ability to craft almost anything, as she proudly demonstrates when she shows off his heavily calloused hands to the site manager (Bernard Blancan) of a small shipping and furniture business in town where there’s little work to be had, yet his talent surpasses any of the other paid craftsmen, Scarlet (L'Envol) new clip official from Cannes Film Festival 2022 YouTube (1:07). 

From the maker of The Mouth of the Wolf (La bocca del lupo) (2009), Lost and Beautiful (Bella e perduta) (2015), and 2020 Top Ten List #1 Martin Eden (2019), Marcello’s films are known for their painterly visual detail, with the director doing his own framing, where each image is perfectly composed, in this film featuring the astonishing cinematography of Marco Graziaplena, who worked as a camera assistant on Spike Lee’s MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA (2008), but working in collaboration with this director allows his talent to really shine, shot on 35mm and Super 16mm, primarily with handheld cameras, shaped by a trust in natural light.  Recalling the French provincial life of Claude Berri’s JEAN DE FLORETTE (1986) and its companion MANON OF THE SPRING (1986), ghosts of the past seem to hover over this bucolic landscape as men’s bodies were brutally disfigured from the war, while women faced unending sexual assaults during their absence, each indelibly scarred from the experience, creating an alarming suspicion and a lack of trust.  When Raphaël notices Adeline never responds to the friendly greetings from one particular villager, Fernand (François Négret), a prominent saloonkeeper in town, her coldness has a cascading effect, with other villagers also looking suspiciously upon him.  When he angrily confronts her about it, Scarlet (L'Envol) new clip official from Cannes Film Festival 2022 YouTube (1:56), he’s shocked to discover Fernand raped his wife, who had nothing but smiles for everyone in the entire community beforehand, spending the night in the forest afterwards where she literally froze to death, yet he’s never acknowledged his crime, passing the offense onto this rural family instead, calling them a bunch of misfits.  This sets the stage for the gloom that seems to hang over Raphaël and his daughter, the subject of malicious gossip, with rumors casting doubt on his daughter’s paternity, both viewed as outsiders and a threat to the well-being of those living in town, who are mostly uneducated and have a way of holding onto grudges and superstitions while despising the lower working class, yet Raphaël never forgets the beauty and innocence of his lost wife, transferring that unconditional love to his daughter.  Juliette is a free spirit, given the run of the place, seen at different ages growing up, played by three different child actresses, before blossoming into a beautiful young woman (Juliette Jouan, an accomplished musician and composer in her own right), who is so good here it’s utterly surprising she hasn’t appeared in another film.  Raphaël plays the accordion and pulls an old piano out of Adeline’s storage, showing an ability to repair and tune it, gifting it to his daughter, who sings, draws, reads poetry, and helps him with his work, subsequently becoming a musician, writing her own songs, or setting poems to music, actually composed by Gabriel Yared, with some lyrics written by the director, which add an elegiac flourish to this picture.  Her artistic inclinations become synonymous with the director’s own embellished film aesthetic, where art can be minimized and disparaged, often misunderstood, but its special magic of generating warmth and hope may be the saving grace in this astonishingly lyrical film, a strange love story where dreams and reality merge to rebuild a new life.

There’s a Beauty and the Beast component to this mirroring the father and daughter, beginning with his story, but the narrative shifts to hers, while also entering a quasi fairy tale element mixed with a bitter realism.  Juliette is an innocent dreamer who believes in the power of possibilities, shunned by the hostile villagers who cruelly mock and taunt her, finding solace in the nearby woods where she communes with animals and reads under shady trees, seeking harmony and peace in nature, discovering an aging sorceress (Yolande Moreau) who tells her “No one in the village believes in magic anymore. No one sings anymore, except you,” and prophesizes that one day a ship with red sails will take her away into a better life.  Similarly, the woodcarver aspect of Raphaël is reminiscent of Geppetto, where it’s his daughter who yearns for a real life, rejecting the opportunity to pursue an education in the city, choosing instead to stay near her father, a scorned artist who loses his job, ostrasized by Fernand and his equally lascivious son, Renaud (Ernst Umhauer), with the entire town following their lead, shouting “You should’ve died in the war,” so he takes his business elsewhere to a Parisian toy-shop owner, making wooden toys for children, but the changing world soon has little use for them, preferring electric objects that move.  While there is a sorrowful aspect of the film that resembles the postwar trauma of Miyazaki, like his recent The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka) (2023), but also earlier films like The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) (2014), HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE (2004), and Porco Rosso (Kurenai no buta) (1992), capturing that same generational melancholy and struggle for hope, there is also a whimsical aspect the music brings, recalling the French movie musical tradition of Jacques Demy (the director is a devoted fan), as young girls dream of going to Paris, beautifully rendered as a kind of idyllic monochrome fantasy, with Marcello cleverly inserting Juliette into a department store scene from Julien Duvivier’s LADIES’ PARADISE (Au Bonheur des Dames) from 1930, Scarlet (L'Envol) new clip official from Cannes Film Festival 2022 YouTube (1:25).  Like the answer to her prayer, who should show up as the handsome prince, none other than Louis Garrel as the adventurer Jean, who’s a bit of a cad, initially seen gambling away his airplane, but then literally falls out of the sky, making an emergency landing crashing in a nearby field, where they improbably meet, as if out of a dream, where the sounds of her singing in a lake beckons him to come closer, like the Sirens in The Odyssey, becoming an intoxicating moment immersed in an exquisite allure of romanticism, Scarlet – Clip: "A Drop of Dew" – Juliette Jouan, Louis Garrel ... YouTube (1:39).  Initially enraptured with each other, she angrily and just as abruptly walks away from him after he reveals her tarnished reputation in the village, a decision she later regrets, as she continues to sing about being swept off her feet and taken to faraway lands.  Juliette narrowly escapes her mother’s fate and manages to carve out a life for herself, but must ultimately face up to the harshness of life’s tragedies, told with an extreme degree of intimacy, where the haunting beauty is just breathtaking.  A rebuke to the hurried pace of modern life, with all its conveniences at your fingertips, this is a film about the value of what can be created by human hands, such as farming, woodworking, shipmaking, painting, playing a musical instrument, or even writing the musical notes on paper, yet it’s also a film of sharp contrasts, featuring a quiet domestic life in the face of a rapidly progressing modernization, a fairy tale in the forest in the face of the oppressive patriarchal reality of the community, and the rough appearance of Raphaël in the face of the delicacy of his art.  Weaving together a mix of music, fantasy, history, folklore, and romance, this is a film where we’re literally being transported through time, as Marcello has crafted an ode to freedom, a timeless story of a young woman in pursuit of her own destiny, exerting a subversive emphasis on the self-determination and empowerment of the heroine who does not really need a charming prince, finding instead a collaborative world enriched by music, books, and art, reminiscent of the artistic community depicted in Kelly Reichard’s 2023 Top Ten List #4 Showing Up.

The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)

Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Das Leben der Anderen)                       A                    

Germany  (137 mi)  2006 d:  Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

A brilliantly realized depiction of the East German Stasi secret police, set in the mid 1980’s when they were in full swing, casting their net of surveillance over the entire nation, sadistically turning neighbor against neighbor, all under the thumb of an information hungry police state, where all choices were impossible, where for an entire nation there was no option, as failure to cooperate with the authorities usually meant dire consequences.  This is a revival of Kieslowski’s behind the iron curtain cinema of moral anxiety, and in many ways parallels his 1988 film, A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE (1988), as in this case, instead of an ordinary citizen spying on his attractive neighbor, it is one of the highest Stasi agents bugging the home apartment of one of the country’s leading playwrights, a man who flaunts western attire, interests, books and other periodicals, also having a demure leading actress as his girlfriend, so the police can only conclude he’s up to no good.  In both cases, the voyeur becomes intoxicated with the subject, so much so that they act in a way that might otherwise be considered insane, as it’s beyond logic or reason, and might even be considered an act of love. 

Ulrich Mühe, a man who was in real life married to a Stasi informer, who understands all too well what it feels like to live under constant police surveillance, plays Captain Gerd Wiesler, an Alec Guinness look-alike from DR. ZHIVAGO (1965), an unassuming man of quiet intelligence, a Party advocate who rarely speaks, but continually jots down what he sees in a small pocket notebook, the eyes and ears of the State.  At each level above him are more despicable men, men enthralled with and corrupted by their own power, men who hold themselves above the laws of the nation, who would rather intimidate the entire population into blind obedience.  Their systematic infiltration of the population is legendary, their interrogations ruthless, operating with 100,000 full-time employees, 200,000 informers, forcing each citizen to capitulate to the police one interrogation at a time.  In the opening sequence, Wiesler demonstrates how he wears down his subjects, offering them no sleep, coldly and calculatingly waiting them out until their resistance is broken, then threatening their family or loved ones with arrest until they confess.  Sebastian Koch is the East German playwright Georg Dreyman, “the only non-subversive playwright we have,” while Martina Gedeck is exquisite in the role of his girl friend, the nation’s leading actress, Christa-Maria Sieland, “the loveliest pearl of the G.D.R,” who unfortunately has an addiction to popping illegal pills.  The head of the Stasi is forcing Christa to submit to weekly sessions of sex in exchange for allowing her to work, an artistic practice that is completely controlled by the State.  It is their apartment that Wiesler bugs, sitting and listening and typing his reports on everything he hears.

Dreyman is connected to a community of other artists, many of whom have already defected to the West, which is the government’s greatest fear, which is why they keep such close tabs on them.  Many have already been interrogated and imprisoned, leaving them with a bitter taste in their mouths, while others have been blacklisted and out of work for as long as a decade.  The Stasi’s method is to imprison them indefinitely, but long enough so that they voluntarily never again contribute anything else in their chosen field.  What Wiesler discovers, however, is that these artists are hiding nothing, exhibiting a rare openness in a society that thrives on secrets and covering up, discovering instead that it is his own superiors who have the suspect motives, which puts him in the same impossible position as the people he is spying on.  This turns into a series of calculated risks, where each side realizes they’re being watched, but they have to decide how to act.  When a blacklisted director who hasn’t worked in ten years finally hangs himself, Dreyman and Wiesler simultaneously commit to more drastic actions, beautifully rendered in a musical sequence where Dreyman plays a piece of piano music given to him by the director called “Sonata for a Good Man,” a piece written by the film’s musical composer, Gabriel Yared, which has a significant impact on Wiesler, who begins to identify with “the lives of others,” omitting significant details in his reports, as it’s hard for him to believe his government didn’t drive that man to the breaking point.  Dreyman at one point is heard asking how anyone who has listened to this music, really listened to it, could ever think of it as anything bad.  On several occasions Wiesler nearly blows his cover, one is a beautifully designed sequence in a bar which is one of the turning points in the film, as without ever coming out and actually saying so, he subtly persuades Christa to re-examine her weekly sessions with the Stasi superior, where she inquires into his motives, as he seems to know so much about her, questioning if he is a “good man?” 

Beautifully written, mixing meticulous detail with intelligence and humor, where the tone and pacing of the film are perfectly matched, where the music does not overreach, yet is genuinely in synch with the mood of the film, where the ensemble cast is flawless, and where the urgency of the story starts to feel overwhelmingly personal after awhile.  There’s another scene nearer the end where Christa is arrested and subject to interrogation, a scene of indescribable conflict and tension, where she identifies her interrogator as a friend from an earlier moment in the film, yet cannot reveal anything, where the interrogator himself is under observation, so both are placed in an impossible dilemma.  This poignantly describes living under the thumb of relentless totalitarian psychological pressure, eloquently described in his book as The Captive Mind by Polish Nobel prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz, and the film never for a minute wavers in this regard, filled with small moments that are as revealing as the larger ones, which include a not so incidental reference to Communist Party Premiere Gorbachev, a man who simply walked away from a position of unlimited power, and a man who incidentally changed the entire culture of living under an authoritarian police state, and in doing so, changed the course of possibilities for others.  It’s a powerful work for a first time filmmaker who also wrote the film, whose recollections include his mother being searched by the secret police as a young boy, which may help explain the dramatic impact this film reaches by the end, stunningly understated, yet precisely to the point.