A fight that has been forgotten what it’s about is already lost. Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli) is fighting desperately, obsessed with the idea of becoming a writer. Although he, the working class child, wants to be sent back to elementary school when he wants to continue his education; although his sister and especially her husband think he’s a no-nonsense man who goes to sea and then sticks his nose into his useless books.
But Martin sticks to his plan and tries again and again, even when Elena (Jessica Cressy), with whom he fell in love, shows him another way: She is from a wealthy family, the father would find him a job, and then could he marry her. Or at least he shouldn’t write about the dark circumstances from which he comes. But it desperately wants to exist on its own and for what it actually is.
Pietro Marcello adapted Jack London’s novel “Martin Eden” and moved it to Naples. True book lovers will find the characters too blurred and the struggle for recognition fades into the background. But the black and white scenes that Marcello cut between the actual plot are wonderful, as if we were following Martin’s thoughts and stories in these moments with snippets of silent film and imitation neorealism. And Luca Marinelli is a bewitching Martin Eden, vulnerable, full of suppressed anger. Even when he mocks, his gaze remains infinitely sad – at the Venice Film Festival, where “Martin Eden” premiered in 2019, he was awarded the Coppa Volpi Acting Prize for it.
Jack London’s 1909 novel “Martin Eden” is a remarkably far-sighted book, which is why Pietro Marcello wanted to make a film: “We interpreted Jack London’s novel in a free way,” he says, “and took it as a fresco, that foresaw the upheavals and atrocities of the 20th century, as well as its decisive themes: the relationship between the individual and society, the role of mass culture, the class struggle … “And so he also tried to give his film a visible generality to lend it, not to anchor it in a fixed epoch – so one cannot dismiss all that it talks about as a closed past.
The director creates a dream time that remains indefinite
Marcello creates a strange dream time, with his Naples you never really know where you are. The interiors of the upper class consist of antiques anyway, and the city sometimes looks like the twenties, then again the fifties, and the often shielded Elena wears dresses that belong to the turn of the century but are too short for that, while Martin strolled around even in a quite contemporary down jacket. Marcello turned the novel, which was written shortly after the turn of the century, into a film about the cultural scene throughout the twentieth century.
Elena asked for hopeful stories from Martin, but when he finally becomes a star author with his realistic tales of the misery of the working class – something like that happened to Jack London – he still finds no hope. He truly describes the cruel world he has seen, but he doesn’t think his descriptions will change it. A pathetic man – and that’s what Jack London meant, too, who was himself a socialist. Martin’s pursuit of individualism is both the engine of his art and the disease that eats him up.
With success, an emptiness grips him that he cannot cope with. What remains? Martin Eden does not belong anywhere, he has turned away from socialism, he is too intellectual to his old allies, nobody understands his books, Elena’s rich friends remain strangers to him, and worst of all: he comes to the conclusion that she has never loved him – otherwise she wouldn’t have cared if he was going to become something. Martin Eden is a man full of talent but without empathy. Not even triumph over his origins can save him; Love is not everything, but without love everything is nothing.
Martin Eden, IT / F / D 2019 – Director: Pietro Marcello. Book: Marcello and Maurizio Braucci. Camera: Francesco Di Giacomo, Alessandro Abate. With: Luca Marinelli, Jessica Cressy, Denise Sardisco. Piffl media, 129 minutes.