In Martin Eden, a working-class sailor tries to level up through self-education

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      Martin Eden

      Starring Luca Marinelli. In Italian, Neopolitan, and French with English subtitles. Streaming at VIFF Connect until November 16.

      Italian director Pietro Marcello’s searing adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 novel speaks urgently to the ways poverty, class, and free-market capitalism clear a path for self-serving, ideologically confused demagoguery.

      Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli) is a working-class sailor who is intent on levelling up by self-educating to become a writer, initially to impress his wealthy love interest, Elena (Jessica Cressy). Chided by both sides of the divide for selecting a financially dubious artistic profession, he succeeds but grows intensely individualistic.

      His intellectual acrobatics are infuriating but understandable thanks to Marinelli’s finely calibrated performance, which maintains Martin’s core righteousness as his upward mobility causes an existential crisis that hardens his political thinking. 

      The director must pull off his own balancing act between the thinness of his fairy-tale characterizations and heavy theoretical ideas woven in rather inelegantly compared with other aspects of the production. (Several philosophers are name-checked throughout.)

      He underscores the timelessness of this story by creating an ambiguous 20th-century atmosphere through DPs Francesco Di Giacomo and Alessandro Abate’s striking and saturated Super 16mm photography, and by mixing in archival footage and pop music that feel ironically nostalgic.

      Martin Eden does what few artists or commentators care to do: attempt to grasp at, rather than capitalize on, the fraught humanity and circumstances that lead to dubious politics. 

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