What will eventually be known as World War I is finally over. Columns of exhausted, ragged French soldiers straggle along the horizon. One man separates himself from the others and carries on alone. He is Raphael (Raphael Thiery – “L’homme d’argile”), and he is returning to the farm where he left his wife, Marie.
Madame Adeline (Noemie Lvovsky – “Camille Rewinds”), wife of the late proprietor of the farm, greets Raphael. She has a young girl with her, and she explains to Raphael that the girl, Juliette (played by various actors including Juliette Jouan – “Anime gelleggiante”), is his daughter. As for his wife, Marie, she is dead.
It’s tough times in rural France, little work available, poverty everywhere, but people struggle through. Raphael is a brutal looking man: taciturn, heavy of beard and stature, with a Neanderthal brow and hands to match. But he is also an artist, a musician, and while he seldom shows it, a tenderhearted, devoted man. He is devoted to those around him, the farm family, his little daughter, and the boatwright who eventually employs him.
So begins a story that stretches across two decades, and the growth of Juliette from a baby into a young woman with ideas and desires of her own. Along the way, we are introduced to other characters on the farm and in the nearby village. Unpleasant past truths are exposed, and result in destructive present day action. But through it all, Raphael’s devotion to his daughter, and her love of him, never waver.
Juliette loves to commune with nature and as she grows and wanders further from the farmyard, she discovers a magical place where a stream runs through a wood. There she meets a strange old woman, a self proclaimed witch, who befriends her and predicts that one day she will sail away with scarlet wings. This sense of otherworldliness is echoed in the way Madame Adeline sees the future in a bowl of water, with pepper afloat forming images. Ultimately, the scarlet wings come true in a bittersweet way.
Director/writer Pietro Marcello (“Martin Eden”) has taken a novel by Alexander Grin and, with co-writers Maud Ameline and Maurizio Braucci, given us a slow moving chronicle of French country life between the wars. We are given time to know and understand the characters and how they interact, even to the point of fearing for the safety of Juliette as if she is your own daughter. We see the tight union of the women of the farm – something from which Raphael is sometimes bemusedly excluded. The one exception to this character development is “the adventurer” (Louis Garrel – “Little Women”), who appears late in the film and whose motives are unexplored.
We are also given some beautiful images of the countryside in a pre-mechanized world. The vistas of water and land, of the village and the farm, of the woods and stream, seem to be taken from the Romantic paintings of a bygone era.
“Scarlet” is in French, with English subtitles, but since the dialogue is spare to begin with, the subtitles are fully explanatory and easy to follow.
This is a gorgeous production, with every element precisely ordered. Don’t expect a lot of action – even a scene of revenge is accomplished through inaction. If you give this film the time it deserves, I think you will love it.
Notes: Alexander Grin (1880-1932) was a Russian writer of romantic novels and short stories set in fantastic locales. His novel “Scarlet Sails” (1923) was the inspiration for this film.
Grin’s “Scarlet Sails” was first made into a film in 1961 by Mosfilm, during the Khruschev era of Soviet history.
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