Scarlet

The small-town period piece set between World War I and the mid-1930s, "Scarlet" is a French fable by an Italian director. Although its style couldn't be more different, its conception evokes Wes Anderson's "The French Dispatch," which was less a portrait of any era's "real France" than a international cinephiles love letter to French movies, French archetypes, and romanticized notions of French-ness. Directed by longtime documentary filmmaker Pietro Marcello, whose first narrative feature "Martin Eden" was one of the surprise art house success stories of 2019, it's a bundle of stylistic contradictions. With its abundance of natural landscapes and rapturous sunlit-and-candlelit closeups, it feels big even though its scope is constrained (the characters rarely leave their small rural community in Normandy). And although "Scarlet" makes a point of emphasizes the poverty and harsh physical aspects of the characters' lives, repeatedly returning to closeups of a manual laborer's powerful, swollen, dirt-caked hands, it also indulges in flights of fancy that are pure moviemaking indulgence, in the best and worst ways. 

Some flights are literal: one of the central characters is a handsome barnstormer who falls in love with the heroine Juliette (Juliette Jouan), a lovely, fierce young woman who grows up under the tutelage of her widowed war veteran-handyman-sculptor father Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry). She plays piano and has a lovely singing voice and likes to bathe in the local stream and read poetry and novels under shady trees and gaze at others with longing, sadness, or resentment. There are also trace elements of ancient fairy tales in the script: the heroine's guardian (Noémie Lvovsky) tries to teach Juliette magic while lamenting its diminished importance in the era of automobiles, airplanes, and mass-produced machinery. Another recurring character is sort of a Gallic Baba Yaga: an old woman played by Yolande Moreau who lives alone in the woods when she's not drinking at the local pub, and appears to Juliette at transitional moments in her life, predicting her future, speaking in aphorisms, and smiling sweetly.

Cinematographer Marco Graziaplena's soft, grainy, 16mm camerawork favors classic handheld "documentary-style" shots, relying on zoom lenses and shake to suggest immediacy. But it's in service of kind of low-budget version of an epic melodrama that might've been released the middle part of the 20th century, with hexagonal lens flares, lyrical montages, a few straight-out musical numbers with "a cappella" vocals and offscreen piano or orchestra occasionally chiming in as backup, and many situations that would've fit right into a silent movie about suffering innocents who can't catch a break. 

The film begins with Raphaël returning home from the war to find that his wife has died in his absence, leaving his infant daughter to be raised by the farm's owner, her blacksmith and his wife. Soon after, Raphaël learns that his wife was raped by an arrogant businessman in town. But although he's distraught and furious and wants bloody revenge, the situation resolves itself in a surprising way that foreshadows developments in the rest of the film, which is less about the possibility or impossibility of making one's own way in life than the necessity of finding the inner strength to accept whatever it throws at you and seek happiness anyway. 

The most affecting parts of the film show Raphaël and various younger versions of Juliette developing a rapport that owes more than a bit to pretty much every cinematic version of "Beauty and the Beast." But it combines the father-daughter and beauty-beast relationships by bestowing movie-star close-ups on his leading lady while filming Thiéry to emphasize his prominent brow, sunken eyes, broad shoulders, knotty hands, and limping walk. Creativity is the core of their connection. We'd probably instantly buy it even if the film had merely told us about it, thanks to the chemistry between Thierry and the three actresses who play Juliette at different stages of life. 

But Marcello and his four credited screenwriters (who pulled the story from adventure novelist Alexander Grin's "Scarlet Sails") are helped greatly by the fact that the two leads are multi-talented people. Thiéry came to acting later in life after a long career as an accomplished professional artist and amateur musician (he plays accordion and tunes a piano here, and the camera makes sure you know that he can actually do both things). Jouan is a musician who can actually sing and play. Both have been recorded in a way that convinces us that they're really playing or singing, not merely approximating an instrumental performance or lip-synching to a prerecorded track (although Jouan does a bit of the latter in a musical number that unfolds as she's swimming in the river). 

Even more impressive are the many scenes where Raphaël fixes things or makes art. The camera gets right up close to Thiéry's powerful hands so that we can see that he really could get a job as a carpenter, repair a defective machine part, and carve a ships' prow from a block of wood with such precision that the visiting barnstormer, a charismatic carouser with an Errol Flynn mustache (soulful hunk Louis Garrel, the exact person you'd want to cast in a part like this), instantly knows it's modeled on the girl he loved at first sight (and first listen; they're swimming in different parts of the river when he hears her singing and searches for the source of that voice). 

"Scarlet" moves according to its own distinctive rhythm. It's slower and more contemplative than modern audiences are conditioned to accept, and it surrenders to its muse like its characters. You'll settle into a comfortable groove with the film when it's showing people doing complicated tasks with their bare hands in loving closeup, and then bang, here comes a full-length musical number, an interlude introducing the aviator and his partner in flight, or a scene of potential violence or violation (like her mother, Juliette is targeted with unwanted affection by a local punk who thinks they're destined to be together and won't take no for an answer). It's all over the place, and if there was a way to unify all of its disparate elements, the filmmaker never quite figured it out. You have to just agree that it's all of a piece and accept isn't going to settle into any one mode for very long. 

Still, the movie's stubborn insistence on going where inspiration takes it is fascinating. Fans of European art cinema with a retro flavor will want to check it out just for the combination of Jacques Demy-inspired musical numbers (imagine characters from "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" transplanted to a farm town); Terrence Malick-inflected shots of grass, trees, sky, water, and animals; and the intimate but intense scenes of characters from an earlier time doing what they have to do to survive and be happy.