‘Scarlet’ Review: A Daydream Believer Makes Her Own Magic in Lovely French Romance

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticA slight but satisfying choice to open Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, Pietro Marcello’s “Scarlet” isn’t quite a fairy tale, although it certainly feels like one at times.

For example, roughly midway through the movie, a woman who might be a witch meets the film’s fanciful young heroine, Juliette (Juliette Jouan), in the woods and predicts her fortune, explaining that one day this girl — who’s destined for greater things than the provincial Normandy farm where she’s dutifully passed her adolescence — will be whisked away by a ship flying scarlet sails.Set in the years just after the Great War, this charming French-language fable — which hails from the celebrated Italian doc maker whose epic narrative debut, “Martin Eden,” was a critical success on the festival circuit just pre-COVID — is smaller, sweeter and more sensitive than Marcello’s earlier work.

The movie’s sense of reality-based romance, wherein daydream believers make their own magic, is nicely captured in the opening quotation: “You can do so-called miracles with your own hands,” reads the epigraph, attributed to adventure novelist Alexander Grin, whose “Scarlet Sails” loosely inspired the script.

Applying Marcello’s unfussy nonfiction shooting style to a tender father-daughter story, “Scarlet” recalls the work of Jacques Demy (especially “Donkey Skin”).