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.

Staying Vertical (Rester vertical)

Director Alain Guiraudie

 



  

STAYING VERTICAL (Rester vertical)         B                 

France (100 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  Alain Guiraudie

An erratic, hilariously funny, yet extremely bizarre film that goes overboard on sexual indulgence mixed with comic absurdity, that was apparently inspired by news stories of wolves returning to France, where Guiraudie has fashioned himself something of a Charlie Kaufman screenplay featuring a procrastinating screenwriter driving his Renault around the rural country roads of France suffering from writer’s block.  That makes this a road movie, of sorts, though there are plenty of stops along the way, veering into mythological fantasy sequences and an exploration of the surreal.  While the story itself couldn’t be more offbeat and wacky, it retains the same cool precision of the director’s earlier film, Stranger By the Lake (L'inconnu du lac) (2013), using a surgical yet outrageous style to convey an anxiety-ridden, inner turmoil of eccentric characters who are mostly seen in deadpan expressions.  The lead character Léo (Damien Bonnard) is an everyman kind of guy with no distinct personality, known for having recurring telephone conversations with his agent about a long overdue script that he claims is nearly completed, though he hasn’t written a word, that invariably end with Léo asking, “Could you wire me 3000 euros?”  As he travels the roadways, he encounters a young teenage kid on the side of the road, Yoan (Basile Meilleurat), doubling back to ask him if he’d like to be in a film, adding a homoerotic subtext, telling him, “You don’t see too many faces like yours around here,” but is resoundingly rejected.  Not taking no for an answer, it’s clear Léo has something else in mind, but the kid is not interested, so instead he ends up hiking through an open plateau of sheep grazing territory, where he encounters a young shepherdess Marie (Linda Hair), who keeps a rifle by her side on the lookout for wolves.  Léo is ecstatic about the possibility of seeing a wolf, where he thought it might only be rumors.  Marie’s view is vehemently different, claiming they are a pest to the herd, a clear and present danger for farmers in the region.  While she wants to kill them all, he values every life.  Next thing you know, the two are on the ground groping each other and having a frenzied sexual encounter.  Inviting him to stay, their sexual tryst continues under the watchful eyes of her two children along with her haggard-looking father Jean-Louis (Raphaël Thiéry), who looks like a punch drunk boxer well past his prime who’s taken a few too many blows to the head, leaving him constantly looking dazed and confused, like a live version of the ogre Shrek, or something out of a Bruno Dumont movie. 

Léo appears to be something of a drifter, a perpetual wanderer, who moves back and forth between the city and the outlying area, seen in a tiny urban apartment slouched over a typewriter, making no progress whatsoever on his screenplay, yet he always returns back to Marie, helping to look after her unruly kids.  Adding to the weirdness, Guiraudie loves to show the nude female anatomy of Marie in a close-up view of her genitalia along with her abdomen and ample breasts while lying in bed, reminiscent of Gustave Courbet’s famous painting L’Origine du monde (11,000 × 9,113 pixels), quickly cutting to a graphically raw, live birth delivery, complete with all the vaginal fluids intact in a scene that may be difficult to forget, that may have some in the audience reeling in shocked surprise.  Cleaned up and wrapped in a blanket, Marie shows little interest in holding her baby, a duty that goes to Léo instead.  Next thing you know, Léo, assuming Marie’s role, is out in the fields guarding the sheep, where off in the distance he can see Marie and her two kids scampering away, abandoning Léo and the baby, apparently suffering from postpartum depression, but also trapped by the claustrophobic existence with her father, where she is clearly unhappy.  When Jean-Louis incredibly uses the crying baby as bait to attract the wolves, placed out in the middle of an open field while he stands nearby with a rifle, Léo, a born wanderer, has little choice except to hit the road with a baby in his arms.  When he returns looking for Yoan, what he discovers appears to be an empty house with Pink Floyd music on full blast, though we learn he’s ripped off the old man he takes care of, Marcel (Christian Bouillette), a cantankerous, foul-mouthed old man who spews racist and homophobic insults, calling the kid a thief and an ungrateful “little faggot” who stole all his savings, among other things, suggesting he may have run off to Australia.  Crushed to be left all alone, Léo befriends him and tries to help out, but he’s still got that baby.  In perhaps the strangest sequence, Léo runs off to an enchanted forest to visit a new age psychotherapist in a white coat using the latest natural methods, Doctor Mirande (Laure Calamy), where she’s able to read his anxieties through the placement of plants on his body, using them like an EKG electrocardiogram chest exam.  As we see him row a canoe upstream through a mythical forest, baby in tow, he hears the calling of his agent (Sébastien Novac) looking for his script.  Like a deeply troubling dream, he panics and hides in the lush foliage, terrified that he might be discovered, only to surface sometime later while the doctor and agent are calmly having afternoon tea.   

Léo can’t play the scriptwriting card anymore, leaving him destitute and without income, yet still clinging to this baby, who has a kind of Bressonian Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) effect, as hardships seem to follow the baby carrier, robbed and stripped naked by a group of homeless men, who attack him like a pack of wolves, leaving him to wander the hinterlands completely naked.  With no place else to go, he returns to Marcel, grumpier than ever as he feels abandoned and so close to death, leading to one of the more intently sexualized visions of euthanasia with Léo more than happy to oblige, erect penis and all, set to the rollicking score of Pink Floyd.  It’s a mindblowing moment, the kind you won’t see anywhere else, made even more absurd when he’s back on the run afterwards, yet shocked to discover a tabloid picture of himself on the front page with headlines screaming “Man sodomizes, then euthanizes, elderly man in front of his baby.”  Now thoroughly disgraced in the eyes of the public, his humiliation and fall from grace is not complete until social services comes to take his baby away from him, returning the infant back to the arms of the mother that never wanted him in the first place (now with a familiar new boyfriend), as if that provides some needed societal equilibrium.  Retreating back to the farm, where sexual advances by Jean-Louis were previously rebuffed (though that itch is currently being scratched by someone else), Léo sleeps out in the barn, never parting from the flock of sheep he vows to protect.  “Wolves Kill Here” is a hand-made sign from Jean-Louis, a reminder of a terrible incident where several of his sheep were slaughtered with no one watching over them, which is etched indelibly in Léo’s mind.  In the beginning he expressed a kind of idealistic admiration for wolves, though now he’s come full circle, realizing they are a predator threatening his sheep.  This is a film that boldly creates plenty of dead ends and misdirection, cryptically heading off-road into the mystic, as Léo ends up as a kind of Christ-like mythological wayfarer, always showing more compassion for others than for himself, the kind of person that would never cause harm to anybody else, yet absorbs the constant wrath of others, mirroring society’s pain and discontent.  The shepherding motif remains perplexing throughout, the idea of protecting the lambs from the slaughter, yet equally curious is this idea that the wolf is both within and without, depicting a sexual beast of unsuppressed desire that lies within, contrasted against this surreal view of a dark Buñuelian universe with wolves on the loose ready to devour their pray at any moment, suggesting perhaps that we must learn to protect ourselves against our own predatory instincts.