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.

House of Tolerance (L’Apollonide – souvenirs de la maison close)

HOUSE OF TOLERANCE (L’Apollonide – souvenirs de la maison close)    B+

aka:  House of Pleasures

France  (125 mi)  2011  d:  Bertrand Bonello

Stylistically, this is one of the more remarkable films of the year, beautifully shot by Josée Deshaies (the director's wife), where the French title is more appropriate, as souvenirs is a French expression for a remembrance or a memory, where perhaps the most exact usage here is a cinematic reverie, where the film has a remarkably lush decorative bordello environment, as champagne flows freely, a perfect compliment for the open display of naked female bodies which are prominently featured throughout this film.  There’s nothing remotely pornographic about this movie, as it rarely shows male anatomy, never aroused, and there are scant few shots of couples actually engaging in sex, and no sex is ever graphically revealed.  Instead, Bonello is more interested in the down time, in the type of activity that normally occurs offstage when they’re not working.  His camera is all over documentary style repetition of banal detail in showing the ordinary, day-to-day routines that the women follow, cleaning themselves and rinsing their mouths regularly, lorded over by the house Madame, Noémie Lvovsky, usually seen in lighthearted, dialog-driven French comedies, and a writer/director in her own right, where the rarely seen LIFE DOESN’T SCARE ME (1999) was one of the best films of the year.  Lvovsky, however, is exceptional in the smart yet manipulative way she understands the business, where the secret is to keep the girls incurring more debt to the house in costumes, clothes, perfume, and other refinements so they can never move elsewhere or obtain their freedom.  In this way, they are literally owned, the property of the house, a flesh and blood commodity to be used in a business transaction.  Very much in the exotic mode of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), both historical pieces and both nearly entirely studio shot, where the deep richness of the plush interior colors are illuminated by candlelight, giving these films a rarely seen sensual opulence that overshadows the more deeply disturbing side of forgotten and discarded souls. 

Bonello’s interest lies in the suffocating treatment of women, where despite the everpresent titillation of the flesh, nothing that we see is the least bit sexually arousing.  In fact the audience is numbed by the desensitization of their dreary working lives, much like the monotonous routine of real life prostitution highlighted by Godard’s VIVRE SA VIE (1962), as despite the frequent repeating customer that asks for you, what you’re expected to endure, because the customer is paying for it, is filled with sexual humiliation and degradation, which is seen as part of the tools of the trade, something women are supposed to get used to.  Set in the waning months of the 19th century, one should recall child labor was prevalent, there were few opportunities for women, as this was the era of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which portrays a woman in a loveless marriage as a caged animal where all the power and rights belong to the husband, as he has a source of employment, effectively owning his wife as his own exclusive property, under the law, free to do with as he wishes.  Here, as in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s work, the filmmaker establishes the various character traits of the women, who and what they like, showing their habits and general tendencies so they become familiar to the audience. Bonello also accentuates the developing sisterhood between the women, who share the same harrowing fate, often seen lying listlessly and motionless in the precious few moments before they have to come to life for their customers.  One of the women of the house beautifully performs as a wind-up porcelain doll for her paying clientele.  In both films, the idea of a wealthy man buying their freedom and taking them out of prostitution for marriage is the ultimate dream, where many believe their beauty and dazzling sexual prowess will bring them what they desire, thinking they are more alluring than a continually deserted wife who doesn’t know how to fulfill her husband’s needs.  Perhaps the ultimate insult is the lie and continual betrayal of men who keep promising to leave their wives, but never do.  Left on their own without a wealthy benefactor, these women age and deteriorate quickly. 

While Bonello dwells on the demeaning internalized side effects of continually pretending to be something you’re not, constantly feigning happiness, he also shows the devastation once reality sets in, using a theme of a brutally treated woman who becomes horribly disfigured, but has noplace else to go, so works in the kitchen or as a maid, or helps dress and prepare the women.  In a rather macabre turn, her value as a grotesque object becomes a specialty item, a sexual novelty that interests the perverse and exotic interests of an aristocratic secret society, similar to Kubrick’s EYES WIDE SHUT (1999), but as imagined by Diane Arbus.  What seems to set the wheels in motion for a steady downward descent is the mention by one of the regular house customers that recent scientific studies suggest prostitute’s brains, along with criminals, are decisively smaller than a normal brain, which accounts for their idiotic behavior.  Rather than the illusory beauty that opens the film with a rush of intoxication, naked flesh, and perfume, the filmmaker retraces the precious few moments before the brutal attack, adding a parallel story of shame from the deteriorating health by one of the women succumbing to syphilis, which at the time was incurable, accounting for the deaths of noted artists Franz Schubert and Édouard Manet.  The director shows no less than a thousand endings, and easily prolongs his movie, some may be a bit overdone, but each one adds another piece of the carefully constructed mosaic, becoming a lament for a forgotten era layered in the heartbreaking sadness of these women, perfectly expressed in one of the most haunting sequences set to the Moody Blues L'Apollonide Nights In White Satin - YouTube (2:59), a kind of vacuous last dance that eptimomizes their lost dreams slipping away.  Bonello reverses the brief whisp of hope offered by Nora’s freedom at the end of Ibsen’s play as an illusory phantom and leaves her stuck forever with no escape from A Doll’s House.  By the end, all the women characters inhabiting this film do look and feel a bit like glassy-eyed ghosts, lost and dispossessed souls with vacant looks emptied and disassociated from the real world. 

One should mention some of the featured actresses, all excellent, who let it all hang out for this film:  Samira, Hafsia Herzi from THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN (2007), Julie, Jasmine Trinca, the daughter in THE SON’S ROOM (2001), Clotilde (Céline Sallette), Léa (Adele Haenel), Madeleine (Alice Barnole), and Pauline (Iliana Zabeth), while two noted French directors are among the house regulars, Jacques Nolot as Maurice and Xavier Beauvois, who recently directed the acclaimed OF GODS AND MEN (2010).