“Scarlet” also uses the poetic motif of Green’s eerie “Scarlet Sails” – hence the name of the movie “Scarlet” (scarlet) and the pilot prince Jean, who flew to this peaceful French town – as a messenger from another world where you can fly However, this new Assol is not so much a pilot as her biplane: she, like a famous cartoon character, wants to fly. Hence the French title of the painting, as “Rise”. It is impossible to take it too seriously – it is striped and uneven in cuteness.
We follow how the heroine grows from a vociferous girl in diapers to a beauty with an independent look and a stubborn chin (Juliette Juan). And as the years shift from World War I to the first electric toys, the genre of the movie shifts unrecognizably as well.
It begins as a harsh drama: the soldiers return from the war and among them, limping, is a corpulent Rafael with the industrious hands of a peasant (the best role in the film is the work of the musician Rafael Thieri, who made his film debut at 54, and she is stupefied by the naturalness). From Madame Adeline (the most trusted Noemi Lvovsky) he learns that her late wife was raped by one of the rural males, and in a fit of rage she turns the entire town against her. But her hardened hands can work miracles with wood, and she at first finds work.
All this is given in the tones of everyday rural drama, and nothing portends sharp turns, first in a violent romance, when the Prince-Pilot appears straight from heaven in the guise of the first French screen actor Louis Garrel, and then in a musical. with radiant songs in the style of Michel Legrand. The girl can not only sing, but also play the piano, which her father revived for her from the garbage. In the phonogram of the picture there are now transparent piano overflows, in the frame – foliage transparent in the sun, and in the forest an almost fairy-tale character already lives – the old woman-wizard (almost animated in appearance, the brainchild of Yolanda Moreau).
And when the scarlet sails appear like a dream in the distance of the sea, the poetics of the painting is finally formed: a direct connection emerges between Green’s brand new romance and pilot Jean’s blue plane. One of the most expressive, almost symbolic scenes in the picture, when Juliette climbs into the cockpit and touches the control sticks, the plane responds easily, comes to life, bypassing the flaps, like a dragonfly ready to take off. He treats carnal love with the efficiency of a young animal, subject to its first impulses, and the true poetry is in these books, in the piano keyboard and in this almost living plane.
It’s fun to watch not only how quickly a risk-taking, independent girl matures beyond her years, but also the magical changes in the pretty face of the movie itself with its disarming naiveté of a lovesick neophyte.
Pietro Marcelli was known as the author of documentaries, in particular, about his Armenian colleague Artavazd Peleshyan. A few years ago, he unexpectedly shot Jack London’s “Martin Eden” and immediately made it to the Venice Film Festival, where he won a couple of awards. This film does not seem like a great success to me, but the director’s courage and his stubbornness in the search for his new vocation were noticeable.
“Scarlet” is a continuation of the search, a test of the pen on several cinematographic fronts at once, and good literature again served as the first impulse. And the way the director lovingly inscribes the action of the game into the footage of the artistically transformed chronicle of old Paris gives away a seasoned documentarian at it. And the wide shot of a row of trucks returning soldiers from World War I camps to their homeland, which opens the film, is even outfitted with old film grain and scratches.
Cinematographer Marco Graciaplena sets his own accents. The first few scenes are plunged into darkness, perhaps to hide the face of a 60-year-old actor, too old for a soldier, but then he needs little makeup. A lot of attention to texture: wood, human skin, waves of water… The motif of two outstretched hands is repeated as in Michelangelo’s fresco, a sweet childish and coarse, senile.
All of this is quaint, beautiful, and, yes, strangely naive. Like those songs that the enchanted Juliette sings naively, sitting in the pose of Vasnetsov’s Alyonushka by a calm lake, like Pushkin’s Tatiana with a novel in her hands. There is something about this dreamy country diva by Kuprin Olesya, played by Marina Vladi in the old French film “The Sorceress”: the primal nature of wild reactions and actions. Not to mention the classic “Beauty and the Beast” motif, which tactfully appears in any scene where the tender Juliette is next to her beloved father, the new Quasimodo with a fragile and vulnerable soul.
Such an abyss of associations that arise in almost every frame of the picture is also a sign of a neophyte who dreams of shoveling all the motives of world culture into his film at once.
