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 Innocent (L'innocent)

Actor/director Louis Garrel

Garrel with Roschdy Zem and Jean-Claude Pautot

Jean-Claude Pautot

Noémie Merlant and Louis Garrel

THE INNOCENT (L'innocent)          B                                                                                     France  (99 mi)  2022  ‘Scope  d: Louis Garrel

An offbeat comedy caper that is more of a character study, while also veering into freewheeling family dysfunction and a heist drama, adapting the director’s own screenplay of mixed genres, co-written by French crime novelist Tanguy Viel and screenwriter Naïla Guiguet, the first without the helping hand of iconic French novelist/screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriére, a longtime collaborator with Luis Buñuel, where all four of Garrel’s films feature him playing an alter-ego character named Abel, a somewhat bumbling Antoine Doinel figure who offers an existential window into contemporary times, though there is no apparent link between films.  The absurd, outlandish nature borders on farce, while it also plays into a crime thriller genre, with the director apparently having fun at his own expense, playing an overly morose character who rarely smiles and is a pain in the ass most of the time, allowing the other characters to shine.  Placing himself as the weakest link in a superb cast that simply runs circles around him talent wise is an interesting choice, and takes guts to do that, but it leaves the center of the picture somewhat deflated by the blind, short-sidedness of Abel (Louis Garrel), who’s a bit of a jerk, with the audience quickly losing patience with him, exhibiting little sympathy for just how obnoxious he really is.  The other surprise is the use of such cheesy, synthesized music, Gianna Nannini - I maschi (1988) HD 0815007 - YouTube (5:57) or Craig Armstrong: Let's go out tonight YouTube (6:01), a throwback to films of the 70’s and 80’s, with the inclusion of fades to black, split screen, and iris shots, yet the generic sound lacks any real inspiration, feeling like a lost opportunity.  So there’s a lot not to like in this film.  On the other hand, the supporting cast is utterly superb, opening with a scene of an imposing middle-aged man delivering an intense monologue about death while loading a gun, setting a disturbing tone, yet when an audience bursts out into applause, enthusiastically lauding the performance, we’re in for a surprise, as it features Michel (Roschdy Zem) as an incarcerated inmate, while the prison drama instructor, Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg), is wildly passionate about his performance, where we sense a deeper connection between the two.  Later we see the two of them happily getting married inside the prison, where everyone’s in a festive mood, even the guards, except a glum Abel, a celebration abruptly cut short due to visiting hours.  This is a tribute to Garrel’s mother Brigitte Sy, who spent twenty years working in prison theater workshops, and did marry one of her students in prison, perhaps best known for her longstanding collaboration with the filmmaker’s father, Philippe Garrel, an uncompromising arthouse director who frequently made stylishly melancholic films starring his son, like REGULAR LOVERS (2005), A Burning Hot Summer (Un été brûlant) (2011), and Jealousy (La Jalousie) (2013).

While the film remains ambiguous about who or what the title refers to, where it may simply be the spirit of the film, Abel’s job is giving tours to children at the aquarium, where his free-spirited work associate is Clémence (Noémie Merlant), who is the real surprise in this picture, as it’s a side of her we haven’t seen before.  Appearing more recently in Céline Sciamma’s 2019 Top Ten List #2 Portrait of a Lady On Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu), a film currently listed at No. 30 in BFI Sight and Sound’s poll for The Greatest Films of All Time, Jacques Audiard’s 2021 #6 Film of the Year Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades, Paris 13e), and Todd Field’s 2022 Top Ten List #2 Tàr, Merlant has been a rising star in arthouse films, winning the César for Best Supporting Actress in this film, which allows her to extend her range into absurdist comedy, blending high drama into comic farce, adding plenty of personality missing in Garrel’s character, actually becoming the driving force of the picture from behind the scenes.  The central relationship between Sylvie and Michel is initially adorable, as Sylvie is totally smitten, head over heels in love, where the world literally revolves around her man, who just happens to be serving a five-year stretch for grand larceny, offered a second chance of love late in life, as he has resurrected all her hopes and dreams that she’d given up on.  Abel, on the other hand, is a constantly brooding sad sack draining all the life force out of everyone, as he’s suspicious of his mother’s new lover, thinking he’s just another in a long series of his mother’s failed relationships with convicts, while suffering from his own trust issues.  He’s already despondent due to his role in the death of his wife, as she died in a car accident while he was driving, something that has haunted him for years, but Clémence, his wife’s best friend, routinely has to remind him how ridiculously happy his mother is.  Why would anyone crush her dreams?  Nonetheless, the film turns on a dime into a crime caper, with Abel following the recently released Michel like a bungling private eye, becoming obvious wherever he goes, where his amateurishness is overshadowed with just how pathetic his protective instincts are, sensing Michel is lying about getting help from “a friend” in starting a new life, as he and his wife plan to open up a flower boutique together.  It’s a romantic turn of events going from a master thief to a flower peddler, and it’s more than Abel can bear, especially after finding a gun and seeing Michel still running with his old crowd, so he eavesdrops on their clandestine meetings taking place, which Michel lies about, claiming he’s working at a furniture store.  The lies are fast and furious, with Clémence wholeheartedly jumping into help mode, appealing to Abel not to tell his mother, thinking perhaps their own intervention might help set things straight.  Predictably, chaos ensues.

Shot in Lyon, the city of the Lumière brothers and Bertrand Tavernier, a fundamental reference point for French cinephilia, where the French are responsible for some of the best heist scenarios of all time, from Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI (1955), Claude Sautet’s Classe Tous Risques (The Big Risk) (1960), to Jean-Pierre Melville’s BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956) and LE CIRCLE ROUGE (1970).  Giving thanks to French film director Jacques Audiard, something of a specialist in prison and crime dramas, also getting help from actor Jean-Claude Pautot, a former figure in organized crime who spent decades in jail as a habitual thief and bank robber, thought to be a shining example of rehabilitation gone right, cast as Michel’s crime partner in the film, even appearing on the red carpet in Cannes, but he was rearrested in Spain on drug trafficking charges at the end of 2022 and is currently back in prison.  The film goes to great lengths to expose the lies people will tell, as Abel and Clémence get roped into Michel’s hare-brained scheme, with Clémence thinking this will help Abel break out of his doldrums by actually taking part in Michel’s planned heist, which, of course, is foolproof.  Having heard that before, this is a familiar path straight into the heart of trouble, but taking a novel turn, Michel puts the two of them through relentless rehearsals, not in what to do, but in how to do it, as they must be authentically convincing in creating a distraction, giving the real criminals more time to pull off the theft.  A clever variation on fact and fiction, a bystander must be convinced of their emotional sincerity play-acting a lover’s quarrel in order to be reeled in.  Admittedly, this clever twist is unique and highly original, with Merlant pulling off a master class of diversionary maneuvers in a magnificent sequence that quickly turns sour, where her performance is nothing less than riveting.  What’s supposed to be just for fun seems all too real, as the actors are actually drawn into their own lurid performances, uncertain whether they’re telling the truth or playing a part, taking a delightful detour into romantic sparks and full-blown drama.  The film goes a little off the rails, with screwball comedy turning into a madcap heist gone wrong, becoming more exaggerated by the minute, yet as weird and wacky as it gets, the closer the two would-be actors become in their own developing partnership.  This pack of lies seem to have drawn them together, yet it completely derails the existing romance of Michel and Sylvie, as she refuses to be deceived.  There are memorable moments where crime and romance intersect, joyfully paying homage to Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959) and the French New Wave, with Garrel actually playing Godard in Michel Hazanavicius’ film GODARD MON AMOUR (2017), while this is partly inspired by events in the director’s own life, becoming a witty and beautifully constructed oddball mix of family, comedy, romance, suspense, and action in this quintessentially French film that aims to please, generating an enthusiastic response when it premiered out of competition at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, while also receiving a César for Best Original Screenplay.  The characters are memorable, taking us places we never expected.  An eminently playful film with commercial aspirations, it probably plays better in a theater full of delighted patrons, but this is more amusingly offbeat than good.