Film review

Pietro Marcello (2019)

When he gave Upton Sinclair a copy of his 1909 novel Martin Eden, Jack London added an inscription:  ‘One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero).  I must have bungled it, for not a single reviewer has discovered it’.  Martin Eden is, as London was, a working-class autodidact who achieves great commercial success as a writer.  Unlike his creator, Eden rejects socialism in favour of self-assertion and is terminally disillusioned in the process.  Pietro Marcello, who directed and (with Maurizio Braucci) wrote this screen adaptation of London’s novel, is also a socialist.  In interviews about his latest film, Marcello has explained the political motivation behind his work.  He isn’t liable to be frustrated by reviewers as London was – many critics, armed with a press pack, see what they’re told to see.  But Martin Eden as politically clear cut as the man who made it may have intended.  The film is hard to follow in other ways, too.

Although he retains London’s protagonist’s name and essential identity, Marcello relocates the action from California to Naples.  When the events are taking place is more difficult to say; this vague chronology, at least, looks to be deliberate.  Sets, clothes and other artefacts suggest different decades of the last century; ditto the archive material – some news film, some documentary footage shot by Marcello over the years – which punctuates the narrative.  Marcello told Jonathan Romney in Sight & Sound (Summer 2021) that ‘I wanted to see Martin Eden across the entire 20^th century’.

At the start of the story, Martin (Luca Marinelli), a brawny sailor, saves Arturo (Giustiniano Alti), puny scion of the wealthy Orsini family, from a beating.   Martin is invited into the Orsinis’ home, where he falls in love (at first sight) with Arturo’s lovely sister Elena (Jessica Cressy).  Some time later, but before he’s a successful writer, Martin, at one of the Orsinis’ soirees, accepts a mocking challenge to hold the palm of his hand over a candle flame for as long as he can.  Doing so, he recites apt lines of poetry, from the penultimate section of ‘Little Gidding’:

‘Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.’

Afterwards, Martin meets a fellow guest, Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi), the ailing but charismatic socialist writer who will become (up to a point) his mentor.  (As will be obvious, this character’s name is also unchanged from London’s original.)  Brissenden regrets that Martin accepted the challenge (‘It was a perfect circus act – they must be still laughing about you’) but compliments him on the ‘nice verses’.  Martin, in response, claims these as his own and that he wrote them for Elena Orsini.  Although Brissenden seems not to know different, Marcello surely expects his audience to.  What we’re therefore supposed to make of Martin’s appropriation of T S Eliot, I’ve no idea.  The implication seems to be that Martin is a fraud but I missed any other suggestion in the film that he’s this kind of fraud, as distinct from someone Marcello sees as politically misguided.

Like London’s novel, the film ends with the title character’s suicide by drowning.  Marcello has illustrated the effects of time and cynicism on Martin’s physical and spiritual health yet the closing sequence, as he walks into the sea and keeps going until deep water forces him to swim instead, has a grandeur that makes it ambiguous, to say the least.  Martin’s taking the plunge doesn’t seem like a final admission of failure.  His self-destruction, if that’s what it is, has a heroic quality.   It could equally be read as an expression of the creative artist who’s prepared to go further and further to test himself.

The strong-featured Luca Marinelli magnetises the camera throughout although this too arguably gets in the way of condemning Martin’s individualism.  Viewers are likely to root for him, thanks to a combination of the lead’s presence and the absence of any competitors for our sympathy.  Although Marinelli dominates proceedings, several women in the cast also register.  Jessica Cressy as Elena and Denise Sardisco as Martin’s later partner Margherita are beautiful in strikingly different ways, as well as temperamentally complementary.  Yet it’s two older, plainer actresses who give more memorable performances – Autilia Ranieri, as Martin’s elder sister, and Carmen Pommella, superb as the working-class widow with whose family he lodges while he’s struggling to get published.  Whatever his other faults, Martin is able to admire Maria’s human kindness, and doesn’t forget it.

10 July 2021