Throughout its run-time, the Italian film “Martin Eden” centres on a paradox. The title character is a charming, if not very refined, Italian sailor whose love for an upper-class woman compels him to become educated. This desire for education stirs an incipient desire for writing, which provides the film’s main through-line as Martin works at becoming a writer. Except, despite his ruggedness, Martin Eden is smart and discerning enough at the film’s beginning to make a good impression without knowing Baudelaire and the names of dead kings that a proper education would provide him with. On one hand, Martin’s initial wrong-headed belief in education leads him to mistrust his best instincts, and yet the way that this idealistic view of knowledge leads him to harnessing his own voice seems like something of value.
This sort of duality is baked into the fabric of “Martin Eden”, which won the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) over the last weekend. The film, which is a picturesque presentation in a style that recalls Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave, affirms the intentions of the prize’s focus on “high artistic merit that also demonstrate a strong directorial vision.” Director Pietro Marcello, mostly known for his long career as a documentarian, directs “Martin Eden” as part wanderer’s travelogue, part dream. Cinematographers Alessandro Abate and Francesco Di Giacomo create an aesthetic of restlessness and wistfulness that makes everything on screen seem slightly more fragile. It’s that fragility that runs throughout the film.
The film’s narrative begins when a random good deed on Martin’s part takes him to the house of an upper-class family, where he falls recklessly and hopelessly in love with the daughter of the family, the demure Elena. Elena is fascinated by the earnest openness of Martin’s life philosophy. He is fascinated by her very existence. His subsequent goal to make himself a writer, the pillar the film is built on, extends itself as a mere tributary of his fascination for her. He will make himself a better man to be worthy of her love. Marcello, who also wrote the script, reimagines Jack London’s novel as an Italian fable. London’s novel was set in early 20th century California, while here we are in Naples, sometime in the 60s (the film never clarifies – part of its deliberate haziness) and in the post-war Europe Martin Eden will do what he can to make the most of himself for love.
Although the romance arc lasts throughout the film, “Martin Eden” is better represented by the open face of Luca Marinelli, as Martin, telegraphing all the emotions of Martin’s rollercoaster journey to success. Or, “success”. In an early scene a pair of educators examine his capacity for education, and inform him that he’d need to go back to primary school to attain real knowledge – his grammar is poor, and his skills of history and art are abysmal. Since non-Italians will come to the film through subtitles, we can’t discern Martin’s grammar issues. Still, the moment affects but for Marinelli’s open despair and as the beginning of an important thread intimating the flawed priorities in conventional system which can only hear Martin’s grammar but miss his enthusiasm for knowledge and cleverness. Marcello is setting us up early for the bitterness that comes later, but Marinelli’s hopeful disposition throughout much of the film keeps tricking us into expecting the goodness that he keeps hoping for.
In one of the numerous striking tableaus of the film, we watch Martin in a makeshift bedroom at the home of his sister and brother-in-law. He is at a table writing and we watch him through a sheer curtain as he is presented in profile, with head bent, shrouded in darkness. It’s a beautiful image that represents the singularity of the tale – a man with his head bowed, but pressing. “Martin Eden” is about that unceasing desire to press forward in a hostile environment. It’s a familiar angle this year at TIFF, where films have been especially angry about class warfare and “Martin Eden” manifests its aesthetic in restlessness and frustration at the status quo. Marcello is sly in how he performs his social commentary. “Martin Eden” is so steeped in the past it looks like a film from the era as he mimics the style of the French New Wave and Italian cinema of the time. Stepping into “Martin Eden” is stepping back to a time gone by but for its anger, which feels elegiac and historical but also present.
Much of this comes down to Marinelli’s performance as Martin Eden. The film hews close to him and he appears in almost every scene, moving from careless but charming rascal to besotted lover to hopeful artist to jaded “success”. The film’s last section, where we meet a new Martin after a time-jump, is its toughest. It forces us to reconsider our thoughts on Martin Eden the man, and “Martin Eden” the film and the paradoxes – of the novel and this adaptation – are on full display. On one hand, Martin’s quest for individuality has led to tragedy for others, and bitterness for himself, and yet the schematic way that Marcello presents his thesis beguiles us because we are left to choose for ourselves.
There’s a charitable earnestness to Martin’s dogged pursuit of life as a writer and Marcello mocks his relentlessness while identifying with his passion. The film bathes itself in sunlight even as Martin undergoes the worst of scenarios so that we, too, are left uncertain how to feel. At the film’s end, the narrative lags as Martin himself seems uncertain as to the point of it all. Marcello doesn’t answer this either, but instead of feeling like an avoidance or failure to commit, it ends up feeling like a too apt-summation of our own real-world paradoxes. What good is relentless individuality in a world that would see you dead?