Directed by Pietro Marcello
Italy | 2019 | 129 mins | Fiction
Film Source: Kino Marquee
Please note: the distributor has asked us to limit viewing to anyone logging in from Vermont.
Adapted from a 1909 novel by Jack London yet set in a provocatively unspecified moment in Italy’s history, Martin Eden is a passionate and enthralling narrative fresco in the tradition of the great Italian classics. Martin (played by the marvelously committed Luca Marinelli, who won the Best Actor prize in Venice FF) is a self-taught proletarian with artistic aspirations who hopes that his dreams of becoming a writer will help him rise above his station and marry a wealthy young university student. The dissatisfactions of working-class toil and bourgeois success lead to political awakening and destructive anxiety in this enveloping, superbly mounted bildungsroman.
“An absolute blast. Includes documentary footage, wealthy decadence, left-wing politics, angry speeches (in Italian!), beautiful women, square-jawed men, quotations from Baudelaire and the heroic deployment of manual typewriters, hand-rolled cigarettes, ascots and Volvo sedans. Everything I love in movies, more or less.” ~
Director’s statement:
“We loosely interpreted London’s novel and took «Martin Eden» to be a fresco that foresaw the 20th-century’s perversions and torments, as well as its crucial themes: the relationship between the individual and society, the role of mass culture, the class struggle… In the movie, the parable of the negative hero created by London opens with footage of the anarchist Errico Malatesta, then draws parallels with the lives and works of a number of the poètes maudits writers of the 1900s, from Vladímir Majakóvskij to Stig Dagerman and Nora May French. We imagined our Martin crossing the 1900s, or rather a crasis, a dreamlike transposition of the 20th century, without time constraints, no longer in the original California of the novel but in a Naples that could be any city, anywhere in the world.”