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.

Priscilla

 

Director Sofia Coppola

Cailee Spaeny with Best Actress prize from Venice

Elvis and Priscilla

Coppola on the set with Spaeny and Jacob Elordi

Sofia Coppola with Priscilla Presley

PRISCILLA               B+                                                                                                             USA  Italy  (113 mi)  2023  d: Sofia Coppola

I wanted to write about love and precious, wonderful moments and ones filled with grief and disappointments, about a man’s triumphs and defeats, much of it with a child-woman at his side, feeling and experiencing his pain and joys as if they were one.

—Priscilla Presley, from the epilogue of Elvis and Me, 1985

Sofia Coppola is an acquired taste, and not everyone gets her, including yours truly, where her career has largely been viewed as a series of hits or misses, with Lost in Translation (2002), Somewhere (2010), and now this film remaining the most successful examples of her highly personalized, semi-autobiographical style.  Yet do we really need another Elvis story, coming so soon after Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS (2022)?  Probably not, but with each of these directors you’re likely to get a mystifyingly unique take on a familiar subject.  Having grown up in the era of Elvis, seeing him plastered on magazine covers, he was the Hollywood matinee idol in the music world, yet his celebrity status was elevated beyond comprehension.  And that’s where Coppola comes in, as that’s a world she not only knows but is intimately familiar with in ways the rest of us aren’t.  So perhaps she’s as good as anyone to guide us through this journey.  The beauty of this film is it’s not really about Elvis, who is a gargantuan force, obviously, but purely secondary, as the entire film, literally every moment, is seen through the young and impressionable eyes of Priscilla, who remains starstruck by the powerful presence and superstar power of a man who is ten years older, already known as the King, an icon in the music industry, one of the most popular and influential artists of the 20th century, where his popularity was unprecedented, providing an almost fairy tale existence of wealth beyond her wildest dreams, where this becomes a Beauty and the Beast saga.  Unlike Coppola’s MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006), which was dripping with artificiality, this is a fairly realistic but minimalist portrayal, providing an exclusive look at what went on behind the scenes, confining much of the story to the bedroom, living room, and other private quarters, where so much of it takes place in the dark, shutting out the outside world, which is a fitting metaphor for the cloistered isolation of fame, where her suffocating marriage is viewed as a gilded cage, becoming something of a metaphorical prison.  Adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me (co-written with Sandra Harmon), she is listed as an executive producer, though the film does not have the support of the rest of Presley’s family, which denied the rights to any of his music, though early in the film an instrumental version of “Love Me Tender” can be heard.  Nonetheless, at the Venice Film Festival premiere, Priscilla was reduced to tears while the film received a 7-minute standing ovation.  Coppola simply doesn’t make films like anybody else, where each is a unique experience, giving viewers an opportunity to experience the familiar with a new awareness, as this is a much different perspective on both Elvis and Priscilla, providing an intimate and unflinching human portrait, recalling another famous figure in Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (2016), yet Coppola’s restrained and thoroughly impressionable style can be confounding to viewers who expect a coherent storyline, or a recognizable biographical timeline, where this is a quieter and more understated character study that is essentially a love story, with a killer soundtrack that couldn’t be more mesmerizing, providing a poetic, internalized narrative, while the personalized nature of the subject matter is unmistakable. 

While Lisa Marie Presley (who died from a heart attack earlier this year), the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, praised the Baz Luhrmann film that earned close to $300 million dollars worldwide, which explored the relationship between Elvis and his longtime manager Colonel Tom Parker, she had nothing but scorn for Coppola’s script, revealed in exchanged emails with the director, claiming “My father only comes across as a predator and manipulative.  As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character.  I don’t read this and see my mother’s perspective of my father.  I read this and see your shockingly vengeful and contemptuous perspective and I don’t understand why?”  However she died before ever seeing the film, though it was not likely to change her view, as she was the sole executor of the Presley estate and extremely protective of her father’s legacy.  Priscilla Presley, on the other hand, was free to express her own life without any restrictions or limitations, and praised Coppola’s film for its realism.  Her book was actually dedicated to Lisa Marie, and was a #1 New York Times bestseller, yet the content of the film that Lisa Marie found so objectionable originated in her mother’s autobiographical book, as there’s nothing fictitiously added in Coppola’s version that’s not found in the book.  One unmistakable connection exists between Lisa Marie Presley and Sofia Coppola, as they are both daughters of famous celebrities.  All of that is a curious backdrop to the film, where what’s perhaps the most surprising is the age of Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) when she first met Elvis (Jacob Elordi) at a party, as she was only 14, and in 9th grade, while he was the biggest rock star in the world, with Elvis acknowledging “Why, you’re just a baby.”  How do you discreetly address the rock ‘n’ roll dilemma of grown men romancing young school girls?  Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, the Grateful Dead, and dozens of others regularly performed the sexist blues standard “Good Morning Little School Girl” and no one blinked an eye.   When Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year old cousin, it caused an uproar, but he continued recording well into his 70’s.  While this is an unsettling reminder of how often “little school girls” are on the periphery of pop music, a troublesome aspect of the male-dominated music industry, Coppola’s film doesn’t shy away from it, with Presley even seen performing Lewis’s signature number Jerry Lee Lewis -Whole Lotta Shakin Going On (Live 1964) YouTube (7:02) at a party, but she also doesn’t moralize over what was obviously a more accepted practice at the time.  Instead she chooses a different way to present the story, where it all unfolds like a dream, with inescapable realities that suggest problematic behavior, but others have gone down that same road as Elvis who died at the age of 42 after struggling with a decades-long substance abuse problem, which worsened in the years leading up to his death, where celebrity status leads to pills, drugs, or alcohol, and a fractured reality, where the history of rock ‘n’ roll is littered with the dead bodies of male and female legends who died before their time.

Set in 1959 near a U.S. military base in Germany, Elvis was drafted into the Army near the peak of his fame, while Priscilla’s stepfather was a career officer, U.S. Air Force Captain Beaulieu (Ari Cohen).  Having grown up in Texas, when we first meet Priscilla she is an overly shy yet pretty girl who is used to being unsettled, unhappily moving from base to base every few years, now finding herself on the other side of the world, much like Coppola moving from movie set to movie set during her childhood, going to different schools in different towns, attending kindergarten in the Philippines during the extended shooting of APOCALYPSE NOW (1979).  While sitting in a local diner catering to American military families, listening to Frankie Avalon’s “Venus,” Frankie Avalon - Venus (1959) 4K YouTube (2:25), she is approached by an Air Force serviceman who asked if she liked Elvis Presley, as he and his wife would be attending a Presley party at his home this weekend and asked if she’d like to come along, assuring her family that he’d be her chaperone.  This simple gesture started it all, literally plucked from obscurity, finding it hard to believe she’d make any kind of impression on a man so famous, but he’s immediately taken by her beauty and innocence, asking a lot of questions about what kind of music the kids back home listen to these days, sharing a first kiss, where she is positively enthralled he actually “liked” her and wanted to see her again.  Unable to concentrate in school the next day, Coppola’s impeccable musical choice is Tommy James and the Shondells - Crimson & Clover - YouTube (3:25), with love blossoming in the air (“Now I don’t hardly know her, but I think I could love her”), as Priscilla is seen with a slight smile on her face as she gracefully walks through the high school corridor as if on a cloud.  And the dream has begun.  According to Priscilla during a Venice Film Festival press conference, “Elvis would pour his heart out to me in every way in Germany: his fears, his hopes, the loss of his mother—which he never ever got over.  And I was the person who really, really sat there to listen and to comfort him.  That was really our connection.”  After regularly seeing each other, developing more than an infatuation, though always playing a passive, subordinate role, she’s positively heartbroken when his tour of duty is over and he returns to the States, as despite his many promises, she doesn’t hear from him again in years, thinking he’s forgotten all about her while she follows his budding movie career in all the magazines, including the much publicized affairs with his female costars.  Then suddenly out of the blue, he calls and wants her to visit his Memphis estate in Graceland, sending her airfare, welcomed by his friends and business associates, where the luxuriousness of the massive estate is hard to even imagine, but they take a side detour to Las Vegas where he introduces her to his prescription pills, amphetamines (Dexedrine) and barbiturates (Placidyls), uppers and downers that he initially stole from his mother (who was trying to lose weight) when he was in high school, the same lethal combination that led to the substance abuse problems of country singer Johnny Cash, which is something he regularly utilizes to get through the punishing work schedule arranged by his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (who is never shown onscreen).  When she returns back from her visit, she looks like a ghost of her former self, sending red flags to her parents, but Elvis convinces them to allow her to live with his family and staff at Graceland, while promising her parents she will enroll in Catholic school to complete her senior year, where she becomes an object of fascination to the other students.   

Incredulously, Priscilla’s drug use continues, taking a pill each morning before school, which may help get her through the day, but her concentration and mental focus is lost in the fog, leaving her scraping by just trying to graduate, resorting to unethical means (cheating) to do so, while the unorthodox nature of her relationship stands out, with a domineering partner who has an overcontrolling nature and a vicious temper problem, as Priscilla wasn’t allowed to work or have outside interests, but was required to be at home when he “needed” her, even as he was away for weeks or months at a time.  Elvis picked out her wardrobe, make-up, and hairstyle, refusing to allow her input, actually threatening to send her back to her parents when she disagreed, reducing her to tears, even doing her packing before relenting and reminding her how lucky she was to be with him, as any woman in America would love to be in her place.  Part of his celebrity mystique is women threw themselves at him, sent him love letters, and willingly offered themselves in the wild chance that he might agree.  While Elvis projected himself as a sex symbol and free spirit, he was extraordinarily conservative, believing the male was the stronger sex and that women needed to know their place, insisting that she needed to remain faithful to him even while he engaged in multiple affairs.  He was obsessed with firearms and loved to take target practice on the premises, providing Priscilla with a matching pistol for each dress.  What’s most evident is that Elvis was a grown-up kid, enjoying playing pranks, roughhousing, and hanging out with the guys, surrounding himself with a circle of friends who showed blind allegiance (his all-male entourage was nicknamed the Memphis Mafia), where he was always allowed to get his way, growing furious with her if she showed any signs of resistance, while denying all rumors of sexual romances with other movie stars he worked with, especially Ann Margaret, despite the saturated headlines in all the magazines and newspapers.  To his credit, he could be very persuasive, where his sweet talk could be utterly charming, and she could fall under his spell, with the euphoria of their marriage evoking a musical reference to the outlaw lovers in Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS (1973), Badlands • Gassenhauer • Carl Orff YouTube (2:50).  While much of this sounds manipulative and controlling, there can be no doubt that they also loved each other, where the film follows the dozen or so years they spent together, told with an extraordinary tenderness, paying closer attention to the various stages of female adolescence and young adulthood, which is what attracted Coppola to the material, as this mirrors her own transition into womanhood.  Coppola’s marriage dissolved during the making of Lost in Translation, while the inevitable train wreck of Priscilla’s marital purgatory also comes to an end, where her boxed-in powerlessness is replaced by separate lives and a world of new opportunities, moving to Los Angeles in her late twenties to celebrate her newly discovered independence, finally empowered to act on her own, beautifully expressed by Santana’s Oye Como Va YouTube (4:17) with the palm trees lining the roadway, yet what stands out is the resolve it took to leave such a powerful man who completely transformed her life.  Cailee Spaeny is onscreen in nearly every shot, awarded the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival, where her mostly subdued and understated performance resonates, especially when compared to the more volatile emotional mix that was Elvis, yet the coup de grâce is the finale, where the inspired choice is Dolly Parton’s transcendent vision, Dolly Parton - I Will Always Love You (Official Audio) YouTube (2:55), supposedly the song Elvis sang to Priscilla after the completion of their divorce, leaving viewers utterly transfixed by the experience.