Pietro Marcello
Martin Eden

Young eagle hungry for everything, irreparably wild, unripe. Furious and not always clear-headed, voracious for words as for bread. This is Martin Eden, this is director Pietro Marcello, and these are the many ragged individuals of the world who think, dream of bridging a social gap through the words of a novel.

In the end, Martin Eden - despite achieving success (as revealed in the first moments of the film) - remains a sailor, a desperate man, a yokel who will never be able to sit in the high society salons feeling at ease. The ambition of “becoming like you, speaking like you, thinking like you” (of the Neapolitan nobility, or of any city in the world) turns into rejection with success. With success, Martin Eden has nothing more to say, his fire has gone out because now he sees that difference reversed.

It is the aristocratic Elena Orsini who now begs for his love. Yet he can no longer love her, because he remains a desperate sailor and to love the successful writer, Elena should have first loved the sailor who ranted at dinner talking about socialism and individualism. He still rants now, but in university classrooms, and everyone likes it, the same words too crude and severe that before everyone told him were unsellable. Martin Eden is the drama of consistency in a world that changes and reverses. It is, if you will, the immutable indecency of a commoner, who remains always the same to himself. Miserable even in the delirium of triumph.

The care that the director (whom I did not know before, but whose résumé appears perfect for such an outcome) puts into this work is impressive. He is just like Martin Eden, furiously sincere, arrogant, megalomanic, and naive. He acts like an accomplished director even though he's on his second feature film, like Eden, he has the nerve to propose us a “big novel”, a hefty tome dealing with the major systems, which wants to give a reading and a meaning to the world and to a paradigmatic social hyperbole like that of Eden (and his infinite counterparts), and finally exhibit its implicit contradictions.

He seems to do it with care, rather he certainly does it with care for much of the film. Thanks also to the help of Maurizio Braucci in the screenplay. Someone who has written some of the best things to come out of Italian cinema in recent years, and the linguistic pastiche that the film regurgitates is impressive. Neapolitan, Sicilian, French, learned Italian, vulgar Italian. Half and half. The language describes the world, marks the path of emancipation piece by piece.

What impresses the most is the caliber of the director’s aesthetic vision. Shots that are paintings, with the watermark changing, with their veils, their diaphragms, the decorations. Grainy or crystal-clear paintings, there is a poetry of the image that appears too rich for a “young” at his second film. It almost seems like a cheat sheet of someone who studied cinema history yesterday and wants to be noticed. Just like Martin Eden. It's a work too gigantic to transparently return the authentic figure of its author, it's a monument too dense to be penetrated. We will have to wait (with joy) for the next works to understand who Pietro Marcello is.

And all of this when Marinelli's face would be enough to make the film, indeed, those big round eyes, both sweet and so furious. But in addition, there is all the aesthetics, the language, the philosophy, the politics, the street, and the palaces. Too much stuff, half would have sufficed.

Half would have sufficed especially because the ending tends to leave some trails unfinished, as if they were just displays of skill like when Martin throws a tantrum, preferring to focus on the protagonist’s existentialism and his revenge, which is not revenge but self-inflicted torture. Like a director who makes such a film and projects himself ten, fifteen years forward, already saturated, devastated, catatonic on the ottoman.

This film and its beauty harbor their own final nemesis.