Scarlet

Raphael comes back to his village from the First World War. His wife is dead and a baby is left. The girl is called Juliette. Raphael is a carpenter; he carves wood, makes toys, and never gets on with the village. Juliette grows; she sings, wanders in the forest, and the children of the village will not play with her. One summer a woman tells her that a ship with scarlet sails will come and take her away. Years later an aircraft comes down in a field and a pilot climbs out. Pietro Marcello directs and co-wrote the script. The film is inspired by Aleksandr Grin's tale of the scarlet sails. Raphael Thiery, Juliette Jouan, Louis Garrel and Noemie Lvovsky are in the cast. It is a French production with Italy and Germany. The film opened the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes on 18 May 2022. Marcello came from documentary and sets real archive footage of the period inside the film. The narrative moves in jumps across the years and the transitions are abrupt. The matter it treats is the people a village shuts out; father and daughter are excluded for the same reason. Juliette Jouan both plays the part and sings the songs in the film. The film sets its fable inside a realistic country life and mixes the two languages. It was shot on sixteen millimetre and the texture is deliberately old. The ending keeps the promise of the fable. Its limit is structure; the narrative is fragmentary, the pace uneven, and the characters stay on the surface. Who it is for: viewers who like poetic storytelling and European art cinema. Who it is not for: it is fragmentary, slow, and the ending a fairy tale.