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Film Review: Magically filmed, "Scarlet" examines one life after World War I

 French actress Juliette Jouan sits on an airplane wearing a red flowing dress  in Pietro Marcello's  film "Scarlet."
French actress Juliette Jouan sits on an airplane in Pietro Marcello's film "Scarlet."

Pietro Marcello’s "Scarlet" opens with a few archival documentary shots of soldiers packed into old trucks and then civilians carrying belongings and walking, as if they’re going home. There’s exhaustion in their eyes. It’s the end of WWI in France.

Then, a heavy-set man in what’s left of his uniform limps past children playing war games. He goes to an old farm where a woman of maybe fifty puts out food for him. Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry) knows that his wife died near the end of the war, but Madame Adeline (Noémie Lvovsky) presents him with an infant daughter he had not known about.

It’s an extraordinary contrast. Raphaël with his rough features, ruddy complexion and empty blue eyes, against the baby in white cap and blanket. Baby Juliette sets her tiny hand on Raphaël’s thick reddish fingers. But at that moment, a bond is set between them.

It’s hard to say just what this movie is. Most of it comes as a hard kind of realism with a vivid sense of image. Raphaël is a woodworker, and again the film contrasts his rough hands with the fine work he does, feeling the grain of the wood, and then planing it smooth and delicate. He makes toys, things like models of hot air balloons with gondolas. He repairs a battered old piano and tunes it. He also plays the accordion. But his profoundly untamed looks make you wonder about what goes on inside this man.

 Actor Raphaël Thiéry in a still from the film "Scarlet," shows a small girl flowers.
Actor Raphaël Thiéry in a still from the film "Scarlet," a sometimes dreamy film featuring a father learning how to raise a daughter in a post World War I setting.

The movie measures time through Juliette’s growing up, from infant to little girl to adolescent and finally to young woman. And the grounded physicality of this world comes through in details of the farmhouse – which is one of those very old European farms with dwellings, barns and shops all connected in a row. But other parts of the picture suggest bits of magic and ancient stories.

Raphaël seems ageless; he doesn’t change over the maybe 18 years of the story. Many things get no explanation – in the way of folklore. For unknown reasons, Raphaël, Juliette and Madame Adaline are thought of as crazy outsiders. At school, kids harass Juliette and call her “witch.”

Actress Juliette Jouan sits in a tree at sunset
Actress Juliette Jouan plays the character Juliette in the French film "Scarlet." Her character comes of age in the magical film.

Grown-up, Juliette (Juliette Jouan) wanders from a sun-bleached meadow into a dark forest that feels out of this world. An old woman with wild white hair

 Yolande Moreau in the film "Scarlet."
Yolande Moreau plays a woman who reads Juliette's tea leaves and predicts big adventures for the young woman in the film "Scarlet."

watches as Juliette plays with a frog beside the stream, and later tells Juliette that one day she will see red sails in the sky and will fly off with them. Madame Adaline reads tea leaves and tells Juliette of the great power she will have.

It’s an odd mix of tones, but I think the power of "Scarlet" comes from its realism and its feel for the details of this life the characters live – the textures of walls, the food Raphaël cooks for his daughter, the solid nature of the train Juliette and Raphaël take to the city with his toys, and the path from the train to home where three thugs leer and make lewd comments to Juliette.


aphaël Thiéry and Juliette Jouan in a still from the film "Scarlet."
Raphaël Thiéry and Juliette Jouan in a still from the film "Scarlet."

At the same time, there is magic to this place. Juliette swims naked in the stream singing a haunting song just as a handsome young man crash-lands his biplane nearby. In the film Juliette is also a victim of life's sadnesses including physical assault.

A woman sits in a tree at sunset while watching a man swim in a pond.
Filmmaker Pietro Marcello creates a magical and dramatic world in his film "Scarlet." Scenes in the film often include dramatic and rich scenes that add to the rich but ethereal storytelling.

Maybe the point is that magic and hard reality live together in a combination that is not easy or comfortable or explainable, that the war has fractured human life and cannot be predicted or organized, and that many planes of life co-exist. "Scarlet" is an unruly film, but it’s arresting and beautiful – and somewhat inexplicable.

"Scarlet" is showing at the Sie FilmCenter July 7-13.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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