Martin Eden

Pietro Marcello’s films typically straddle the line between documentary and fiction while playing off both a 19th-century Romanticism and 20th-century neorealism in their class-conscious focus on wanderers and transients. His most straightforwardly fictional feature is set in a provocatively unspecified moment in Italy’s history, yet it was adapted from a 1909 novel by American author Jack London. Martin (played by the marvelously committed Luca Marinelli) is a dissatisfied prole 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 (Jessica Cressy); the twinned dissatisfactions of working-class toil and bourgeois success lead to political reawakening and destructive anxiety. Martin Eden is an enveloping, superbly mounted bildungsroman. An NYFF57 selection.