Scarlet review – Pietro Marcello spins a soft-spoken, magical yarn

Russian writer Aleksandr Grin’s dreamy short story “Scarlet Sails” is often described as a fairytale, despite a lack of overtly supernatural elements. Scarlet, Pietro Marcello’s loose, trailing reimagining (and his first film outside of his native Italian) echoes this misnomer, housing itself under the perhaps inaccurate descriptor of “magical realism.” While not magical in the literal sense, Marcello has whittled out a tiny gem that evokes a feeling of gentle transcendence – a pint-sized tale of dreams and destiny that leaves you lovedrunk and enraptured by journey’s end.

The story initially centers Raphaël (Raphaël Thierry), a skilled woodworker who returns from the Great War to discover that his beloved wife has died, leaving him alone with his daughter Juliette (Juliette Jouan, in a transfixing debut performance). Thanks to their cloistered lifestyle with fellow widow Madame Adeline (a charming Noémie Lvovsky), they are considered outcasts in their village.

Still, they enjoy their meaningful and meagre lives together, where love is articulated through meals of potato and lard, and hand-made toys are fashioned from stray blocks of wood, carved into submission with painstaking care. Their patient idyll is soon interrupted by the arrival of a swooningly handsome pilot-cum-adventurer Jean (Louis Garrel), setting in motion a fantasy that Juliette has been forewarned of by a curious local “witch” (Yolande Moreau).

While Raphaël, our weather-beaten central hero, remains inscrutable – with milky blue eyes that glower over a thick brow bone, and wrinkled, hardened hands that are a permanent reminder of his homespun toils – the film is interspersed with wartime footage and a discarded croix d'honneur medal that suggest a troubled past lingering on his psyche. Indeed, the doting love he shows for his daughter is upended by moments that change our perception of this ostensibly gentle loner; Marcello follows up one such jarring scene with a shot of the sun finally breaking through clouds, a moment of true clarity piercing through.

Despite the apparent normalcy of these characters, Scarlet feels like a world removed from our own: a delightful ditty replete with wood-whittlers, aviators, adventurists, prophesying villagers. The Normandy location is textured and sonorous, where misty mornings are paired with a trilling piano score and the camera patiently, diligently lingering on the landscape. The story is unspooled from Grin’s pages into something exquisite and expressive thanks to Marcello’s sprightly direction, the gentle, fable-like elements of the short story echoed in a snug and tactile film, whereby a 4:3 frame locks us into a story with pleasingly grainy cinematography.

It’s nigh-on impossible not to be swept up in the simple, lyrical pleasures of a film where Louis Garrel literally falls from the sky to proclaim his love, or where our protagonist Juliette, with the voice of an angel, serenades us into a reverie. The heavenly glow bestowed upon these peasant characters feels like an act of grace rarely afforded to such figures in cinema, and while the story is ultimately a trifle too meandering at times, Scarlet is an unassuming tchotchke awash with a benevolent tenderness.

Scarlet was screened as part of the Cannes Film Festival 2022. A UK release date is yet to be announced.