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.
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.
