Martin Eden

Flooded with the light of the Bay of Naples, its bright reds and blues rendered in 16 mm, the film blends its images with archives, real or fabricated, black and white or colour, illustrating in particular the social struggles of Italy in the last century. This particular texture makes the film a nostalgic and pulsating cut-up, whose superimposed layers blend individual and collective memory, fiction and reality from 1900 to the present day. The intention was to convey the timeless quality of the coming of age story and to allow everyone to interpret the plot in multiple ways today, particularly in political terms. But what this graceful montage of the real and the imaginared also makes possible is, for example, the poignant resurgence of a young Martin, walking briskly along the quays, full of desire and hope, under the gaze of an ageing Martin, whose tragic situation is undoubtedly that he no longer desires anything. Above all, this montage evokes the march of history, the coming disaster, the advance of a world as indifferent to Martin’s gesticulations as Martin is to his own. The anti-hero created by London, inspired by his own life with one major exception - ‘I am still alive!’ - has the madness of a poet struggling with reality, of a man fighting relentlessly against existence, without ever managing to fully embrace it. (Elisabeth Franck-Dumas; Libération)