SCARLET - Mark Reviews Movies

Scarlet, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 8, 2023

The story of a single father and his only daughter during a time of much uncertainty, Scarlet itself seems uncertain of its characters and the story it wants to tell. Co-writer/director Pietro Marcello gives this piece a sense of undeniable, nostalgic beauty, but everything beneath the surface of the movie's look feels far too shallow for the material to make much of an impact.

Based on the novel Scarlet Sails by Alexander Grin, the setting of this tale is a small village in France. Following the end of the Great War, Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry) returns home expecting a reunion with his wife. Instead, she is dead under unclear circumstances, although it's safe to assume she died in childbirth.

This is also a bit of a surprise to Raphaël, but regardless of what may or may not have happened, he is determined to make a living for himself, his daughter, and the kindly farmer's widow Adeline (Noémie Lvovsky), who cared for his wife before her death and has tended to the newborn since. The man is a woodworker by trade, and after being greeted with sympathy and some pity by the locals of his village, he also gets a job.

Marcello, Mauirzio Braucci, and Maud Ameline's screenplay unfolds over the course of about 20 years. It's a lot of time to cover, and as such, most of the story provides vignettes of Raphaël falling into a comfortable routine, only for it to be upended by some revelation, some setback, or the introduction of some new player briefly into his and his daughter's lives.

Meanwhile, the girl grows up in a relative flash, as years pass without warning. Raphaël becomes a pariah after he refuses to help a man who's revealed to be a smiling villain, and by the time she's a young woman, the daughter, named Juliette (Juliette Jouan), is seen as a strange outsider, too. A local fortune teller informs her that her fate will be a fortunate one—but only when red sails appear in the sky to take her away.

It's far less interesting to discuss what happens in this movie, since most of the narrative is so thinly defined and developed, than to talk about the lovely, considered look of it. Marcello, with cinematographer Marco Garziaplena, give it the appearance of something of its era. That becomes especially clear on the occasions when the filmmakers incorporate some archival footage for establishing shots, and the merging of the new and the old is almost seamless.

These characters just exist, though, for the melodrama, even if Thiéry embodies an ideal of unconditional, paternal love and Jouan possesses the ideal appearance of an ingénue. The characterizations and plot of Scarlet don't dig any deeper than such descriptions, unfortunately and regardless of how striking the movie's aesthetics may be.

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