Sail, Sail Away
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Sail, Sail Away
A brief review of Pietro Marcello’s film, “Scarlet”
By Mountain Shadow Director, John Bennison
A talented wood carver, Raphael returns from the war trenches to a small French village; to find his wife has died, but left behind an infant daughter, Juliette. Raphael finds work with his hands; as gossip and rumors, recriminations and retribution lurk in the dark corners of the village. Years will pass. Juliette will grow through her childhood years to young adulthood with her loving father and a substitute mother. She will see the larger world around her change, and the next chapter of her life – yet to be written, or sung – will beckon her. At the keyboard of an old piano, she will pluck out a wandering melody line,
“I’d like to go away with you. Far away, far away with you. See the earth fall away. What would I risk, in the softness of the clouds. I must leave my horizon behind. See other shores. Little swallow, little swallow with big black eyes. Little swallow, I love you. Fly off like a comet. As I fly away, I’ll seduce the sun. The world down here is too narrow. The stars are calling me. The stars are calling me toward freedom.”
“Scarlet” is a period fable cinematic form, based on a 1923 novella by Russian writer Alexander Grin. There are strong and stunning metaphorical images in nearly every scene; along with fairy-tale elements with witches, frogs, magical brew and incantations.
“No one believes in magic anymore,” says the witch in the forest. “No one sings songs anymore, except you. The sails are magnificent. When you’re a beautiful young woman, one morning you’ll spot scarlet sails in the sky, they’ll be for you. And you’ll fly off with them to a distant land. Everything you can imagine is possible. Dreams can come true.”
More than a fairy tale, a fable is typically wrapped in a moral lesson to be revealed in the end. But typical of many international films we enjoy, it is left to the viewer to draw lessons from the tale being told; using your own imagination to envision what might be just over the horizon.
“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. Far, far away from here to immense shores …”
Excerpt: Filmmaker Interview
Q: Scarlet (L’Envol) is a loose adaptation of Scarlet Sails, a novel by Soviet author Alexander Grin. What was it in this novel that convinced you there was a film to make?
A: Initially, I hadn’t planned to adapt “Scarlet Sails.” It was my producer, Charles Gillibert who suggested I read it. Alexander Grin was an adventure writer, born at the end of the nineteenth century. A revolutionary socialist who began his literary career after the 1905 revolution, he was arrested several times because of his political activities. His most successful works were published after the October Revolution, but despite their success, the antimilitarist and romantic tone of his books didn’t suit the new age and publishers stopped publishing him. He died an outcast, in poverty.
What first caught my interest in the novel is the relationship between the father and the daughter. The mother dies, so the father has to look after the child. The bond that forms between them is what fascinated me. And it was even more fascinating to imagine what would happen when the father dies, because in the book the girl goes from one man, her father, to another, her husband – who comes into her life like a prince charming. To my mind, Jean [Louis Garrel] is the prototype of the modern man, completely unlike Raphaël [Raphaël Thiéry] who is like a rock. Jean is fragile and unstable, a kind of daredevil who doesn’t know where he fits into the world. Juliette isn’t saved by him, she isn’t a damsel in distress; rather she is the one who makes the first move, who kisses him, who looks after him and, in the end, lets him go.
A second aspect of the book that struck me is the strange extended family that looks after the father when his wife dies. It was very unexpected and I found it very modern. There was the potential to create a little matriarchal community of outcasts. In the film, the people in the village call this matriarchal family the “Cour des miracles”, a historical French term for a poor slum area for beggars in central Paris. This family is made up of a little group of people living on the edge: the woman farmer who people think is a witch, the blacksmith, his wife and daughter, and Raphaël and Juliette.They are all outcasts, each despised for one reason or another.
About the Filmmaker
Pietro Marcello was born in Caserta, Italy. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples. In 2009, he made the feature film La bocca del lupo, winner of the 27th Turin Film Festival. In 2019, he made his first fiction feature, “Martin Eden,” from the eponymous Jack London novel, which won numerous awards, including Platform Prize Toronto International Film Festival in 2019.
