A Seaside Love
Pietro Marcellos’ “Martin Eden”
BY STEVE ERICKSON
A man tries to rise above
poverty through art. He
also feels that he needs to
do so to impress a beautiful,
well-off woman. He succeeds
at the cost of his soul.
Those three sentences sum up
the plot of Italian director Pietro
Marcello’s latest fi lm, “Martin
Eden,” but they can’t convey its urgency
or strangeness. It’s a slick,
very entertaining period piece that
will probably please Merchant-
Ivory fans. It’s also an example of
left postmodernism critiquing the
culture it describes.
Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli,
who played one half of an immortal
gay couple in the Netfl ix superhero
fi lm “The Old Guard”) starts
out as an uneducated sailor, toiling
away on Naples’ waterfront. Inspired
by his desire to court Elena
Orsini (Jessica Cressy), he tries to
make something more of himself
through writing, although classist
gatekeepers tell him to head back
to primary school. Yet he persists
and eventually fi nds success.
Marinelli’s performance convincingly
takes us through a character
whose life is always a work
in progress. For the fi rst half of
“Martin Eden,” the man is genuinely
humble, and the spectator
never questions the sincerity of
his convictions. In a fl ashback to
neo-realism, he drags Elena down
an alley full of desperate sex workers
and pimps through a plaza full
of rubble to prove to her that the
grinding life he writes about is real.
But the more he publicly embraces
his badly thought-out brand of libertarian
politics, the more his life
spins out of control. In the last half
hour, Martin looks tired, with longer
and blonder hair. As his popularity
rises, he starts to look and
act like an arrogant, strung-out
rock star spouting someone else’s
bad ideas. This peaks at a public
Q&A session where critic Neil Bahadur’s
comparison of the character
to Kanye West in 2018 really
rings true. Martin ultimately plays
out the worst notions about the behavior
STREAMING CINEMA
KINO LORBER
Luca Marinelli, who portrayed a gay man in “The
Old Guard,” stars as Martin Eden.
of a male “genius,” hurting
himself most in the process.
The setting of “Martin Eden” is
always in fl ux. While it must span
decades of Martin’s life, the timeframe
always looks like Italy just
after World War II. Constant talk
about war can’t be pinned down
to any actual one. Characters
wear costumes evoking different
decades in the same scene. Some
of Marcello’s imagery brings early
20th century cinema to mind,
but his style apes the French New
Wave and New Hollywood.
Marcello incorporates techniques
like having characters
speak directly to the audience and
using actual fi lm footage of Italian
history for fl ashbacks. Constant
reminders that we’re watching
a fi lm don’t make Martin’s story
any less involving, but Marcello’s
gamesmanship reminds us that
balancing fame and political conviction
— or just trying to be both
a celebrity and a decent person
— hasn’t gotten any easier in the
111 years since Jack London wrote
the source novel. London intended
his work to be a warning against
rejecting socialism in favor of individualism.
To return to the Kanye
West parallel, Martin mistakes
embracing the mess he’s made of
his life for liberation.
MARTIN EDEN | Directed by Pietro
Marcello | Kino Lorber | In Italian
with English subtitles | Starts
streaming through Film at Lincoln
Center Oct. 16
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