To redeem the prevailing baseness of Italian cinema are some authors-poets of the
cinematographic imagination, such as Pietro Marcello, Alice Rohrwacher or GiorgioRights... beyond the different filmic scaffoldings... their works question theutopia of the human and question loss as the key to the royalty of beauty,justice and the common good... in their works every word, every look, everysmile, every tear, every love... is a word of knowledge that teaches us to liveas if to die in the dream of a thing called love, out of all diversity,adversity, oppression tarred in the precepts of the Faith or the State or War...Pietro Marcello's film Scarlet Sails, loosely based on the novel of the same nameby Aleksandr Grin (Grinevskij), surprises for its visual beauty and for thedreamlike power of the shots, the filmic inlays, the actor's chiasmi that elevateit so much to melancholy compositional by Andrej A. Tarkovskij, as to the ethicalausterity of Robert Bresson. Marcello, the visionary-libertarian of La bocca delwolf (2009), Bella e perduta (2015), Martin Eden (2019), continues his journey asan aconformist author with Le vele scarlatte and enters the poetic universe ofthe anarchist Aleksandr Grin . His film is a hymn to the love of women and forwomen who claim their uniqueness and an accusation against the complicity,enslavement, cruelty of man under every immeasurable macho condition.Grin, let's remember, was a Pole born in 1880 in Slobodskoj, in north-easternEuropean Russia... he was imprisoned several times for subversive activities...he published his first book in 1906 and was sent into internal exile... he fledto St. Petersburg where he survived in hiding. In 2010 he was arrested again andsent to the Archangel region in northern Russia. He participates in the OctoberRevolution of 1917 but rejects the bureaucracy and violence of the dictatorshipof / over the proletariat. He continues to write novels and short stories, yetremains on the fringes of Bolshevik literary movements. Suffering fromtuberculosis, he moved to the Crimea in 1924 with his wife Nina and lived inconditions of extreme poverty.As we know, the publisher L. V. Volfson, who had begun to publish the entire workof Grin in fifteen volumes, was arrested by the GPU (the secret police of theSoviet regime until 1934) and the work was interrupted in the eighth volume.Since 1930, reprints of Grin's books have been banned by Bolshevik censorship,and the writer gets his food by hunting. He died in 1932 of stomach cancer. For along time his books will be removed from communist libraries but starting from1959 some intellectual friends of Grin begin to publish his writings whichreceive a certain response from readers. In 1960 Grin's wife opened a museumdedicated to her husband in the house in Stary Krym, where they had lived. Thelibertarian thread that runs through Grin's entire work unravels in a creativefreedom hostile to any form of authoritarianism.Le vele scarlatte di Marcello is a film-feminine but not feminist... a film-fairybut not a fairy tale... it is instead a film-reverie which tells, under severallayers of reading, the dream, the desire, the pleasure of the fantasticabandonment fades into reality. We are well aware that Marcello knows Russianliterature and cinema, especially writers and filmmakers of Soviet dissidence ordissidence, however in Le vele scarlatte he seems to us a modern Marcel Carnè whotakes up the misty atmospheres of Il porto delle nebbie (1938), also ableferryman of libertarian compassion in Julien Duvivier's La bella brigade (1936)or poacher of amorous disenchantment in A trip to the countryside (1936), one ofJean Renoir's masterpieces... and manages to narrate perhaps one of the bestfilms of Italian cinema after the pages creases of Neorealism. In particular, itis Vittorio De Sica's Miracle in Milan (1951) (written by Cesare Zavattini) thatthe director turns his gaze to and the entire film is wrapped in the amazementand wonder that lead to the infinity of love.Let's take the synopsis of Scarlet Sails: "In the rural north of post-war France,Juliette, a young motherless girl, lives with her father Raphaël, a surly warveteran. Due to her dreamy nature that leads her to isolate herself, she isfrowned upon by the other villagers, especially by men. One day, along the riverbank, a sorceress predicts that "scarlet sails" will arrive to take her away fromthere: Juliette continues to hope until one day the prophecy does not seem tocome true, when a charming aviator literally rains from the sky. Marcello's filmis all of this but there is much more to rummage through the folds of his narration.Louis Garrel has little to do with the prince charming of fairy tales andJuliette less than ever with the daughter of a widowed and lame war veteran whois a carpenter and builds toys waiting to fly away from a multi-ethnic communitythat welcomed her and beloved... if anything, wait for the adventurer who willcome from heaven and stay on the farm with Mrs. Adeline (exceptional portrait byNoémie Lvovsky) and the others, out of the greed and ignorance of utilitarianism,in remembrance of the libertarian teaching of his father disappeared.The expressive robustness of Le vele scarlatte overflows in Marcello's largeshots... the director is close to the characters and connects the environment,faces and bodies in an aesthetic construction that is not exactly pictorial oreven magical, as has been said, but rather in a visual surreality that imbues thefilm with the exiled beauty of everyday life. Juliette's father instills in hisdaughter confidentiality, discretion, pride, the dignity of his own life and thedaughter embodies the sense of freedom that does not want masters, only loveswithout fences, since freedom, like love, does not you give, you take.The screenplay by Marcello, Maurizio Braucci and Maud Ameline is stripped of anyspectacular essence... the dialogues are terse to the bone and fit superbly withthe film iconology, as could only be seen in L'Atalante ( 1934) by Jean Vigo,Children of Violence (1951) by Luis Buñuel or This is my life (1962) by Jean-LucGodard... Marcello's film is also a return to amour fou and seems to say: wholoves without love, is canceled by love. In four dialogues there is the substanceof the film:« Rapahel (Raphaël Thiery): "Listen to me carefully, Juliette. I would never makea decision without talking to you first. We will decide what we want to do alwaystogether".The sorceress (Yolande Moreau): "When you become a beautiful girl, you will beable to see scarlet sails up there in the sky. Dreams can come true."Jean (Louis Garrel): "And what did you watch?"Juliette (Juliette Jouan): "Your plane. Are you an adventurer?"Jean: "I make a living."Juliette: "Maybe the people in town are right, I'm completely crazy."Adeline (Noémie Lvovsky): "You're not crazy, it's love that's crazy, anddangerous" ».Juliette's closing song of the film is taken from a poem by the revolutionary,communard and anarchist Louise Michel: "Black-eyed swallow, swallow, I love you!/ I don't know what echo you brought me / From distant shores; to live, supremelaw, / like you, I need air and freedom". And here is the well of all childhoodsshattered and insurgent... the ink of the liberated voice that spreads inauthentic life.Marco Graziapiena's photography is interwoven with impressionist colors, freefrom any mannerism... it fits well with the destinies of a deciphered and at thesame time indecipherable reality, and combines a poem of beauty and justice withthe word never lowered. The browns, the reds, the blues crumble centuries ofugliness and accompany or discover the real in the noble unreality ofdisillusionment.Carole Le Page and Andrea Maguolo's editing gracefully stitches Marcello's filmwriting, sculpts the imaginary on the water of ancestral truths and makes of allthe shadows scattered in the skin of the days, the meticulous plot that revealsthe becoming behind the last silence of the outlaws who did the feat.As in other films by Marcello, the use of archival materials is dosed withparticular architectural skill... instead of resorting to expensive and perhapsless efficient sets, the director inserts colorful historical fragments andeverything flows back into the filmic fabric that restores the breath of apostwar era that will have been anything but intelligent.The music by the Lebanese Gabriel Yared, Oscar winner for a bad film, AnthonyMinghella's The English Patient (1996), infuses Scarlet Sails with a surprisingtenderness, even when underlining the rawest moments. Often the musical themeencrusts the image and reaches a disarmed beauty, takes possession of the gazeand fertilizes the impudent breath of the rebel angels, where they showthemselves to sensitive souls.The director also proves to be a skilled orchestrator of acting. Raphaël Thierry(Raphaël), Noémie Lvovsky (Mrs. Adeline), Yolande Moreau (La Maga), JulietteJouan (Juliette), Louis Garrel (Jean) and even the supporting actors... they arenothing short of exceptional and fully convey Marcello's scenic intentions...those faces, those bodies, those gestures emerge from the screen in the power oftheir singularity and give the story a sort of eternity that frees the flesh fromall the anxieties of a makeup-free existence.The retro-word and the nudity of the imaginal of Marcello's film reveal that nowound in history is the same and even love has its own way of bleeding or ofrevolting against established certainties devoured by their torments... and loveis the viaticum of the origins that interrogates the abuse of power and bringsthe hope of the human to man.Pino Bertellihttps://www.sicilialibertaria.it/_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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