Red
Address: Pietro Marcello
artists: Raphael Thierry, Juliette Jouan, Louis Garrel
Year: 2022
Premiere: 4/14/23
★★★★
Red sits at a curious crossroads between the sublime and the ridiculous, a line many films tread but few tread with such stubborn honesty. The story centers on a young woman whose world expands and tightens in equal measure as a restless aviator appears on the horizon. The gaze shifts beautifully from the grand gesture to the intimate crack in a family’s armor, where the most meaningful battles happen in small, quiet rooms. The film leans into the tension between outward bravado and inner doubt, letting the audience feel the weight of choices even before the consequences are fully revealed.
The narrative deepens when the focus widens to include the young woman’s father. A man returning from the scars of World War I, his hands raw and capable, discovers a home that has shifted in his absence. His wife is gone, and his daughter stands at the center of a fragile new world. Raphaël, portrayed with a soft, almost stubborn gravity by Raphaël Thierry, becomes a craftsman of necessity. He carves a living in a town that feels both intimate and hostile, where every doorway could open to an old memory or a new danger. The daughter’s caregiver, a woman of steadiness and insight, offers a guiding thread: when harm lands on a person, the impulse to self-blame is often the most exhausting wound to tend. The film does not shy away from that ache, and in doing so it finds its emotional center and a quiet resilience.
The production makes a bold visual choice. It interlaces vivid color with documentary-like textures reminiscent of the early decades of the 20th century, a technique that echoes the director Pietro Marcello’s earlier experiments in Martin Eden. This blend of documentary grain and painterly intimacy gives the film a layered texture, where events feel both documentary-real and artistically refracted. War’s shadow looms large, shaping the mood and the rhythms of the town to the point where every scene carries a weight that is almost audible. The film’s rough edge — its unflinching, sometimes raw portrayal of life — sits beside moments of stark, elegant lyricism. The aviator, a figure of wild aspiration, is more than spectacle; he embodies a push against the limits of the possible and the moral questions that accompany such bravado.
Louis Garrel delivers a performance that feels at once audacious and grounded, a rare combination that makes the aviator’s bravado feel earned rather than implausible. The energy he brings to the screen expands the film’s dramatic reach, inviting the audience to reflect on desire, risk, and the costs of pursuit. Yet the heart of Red remains anchored in the quiet, stubborn perseverance of the central family. Their story unfolds with a patient intensity: the small acts of care, the stubborn insistence on keeping faith, and the stubborn hope that life can still offer a sense of belonging even after a world has changed so irrevocably. The film’s final passages linger not on spectacle but on memory — how memories are made, how they fracture, and how they become a source of strength when the present feels unsure. This is a work that trusts its characters and trusts the audience to read the space between lines rather than insisting on explicit statements.
Red is ultimately a meditation on resilience. It suggests that while the world may demand answers, what sustains us are the commitments we choose to uphold and the crafts we use to shape our futures. It is a film that invites viewers to stay with discomfort long enough to witness transformation. The tension between the grand, cinematic gestures and the intimate, domestic moments becomes the film’s most persuasive argument for humanity’s stubborn capacity to endure and to create meaning in imperfect times. The result is not merely a story about a girl and her world but a portrait of generation-spanning courage, rendered with a filmmaker’s eye for texture, timing, and truth. This is a cinema that rewards patience and rewards those who listen closely to the spaces between words, where truth often hides. (Cited stylistic analysis)