Transit’s protagonist seeks freedom by adopting the identity of writer. So too, after a fashion, does Martin Eden: a sailor moved to take up the typewriter by an encounter with Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), a pussy-bow-bloused member of the bourgeoisie whose prim charms and knowledge of how to correctly pronounce ‘Baudelaire’ he fetishises. Martin transforms himself into a man of letters with ascetic zeal, but the status of superstar intellectual, when he attains it – three quarters of the way into the film, in the space of a single cut that splices together ‘before’ and ‘after’ across a gully of ambiguous duration – comes at the perverse cost of his lust for Elena, and for life. (This disaffection is gestured towards in his first, formative visit to the Orsini household, where a landscape painting draws his eye. ‘From a distance it’s beautiful,’ he remarks on interruption of his reverie. ‘But close up, you see only stains. It’s an illusion.’)

London hammered out his alluringly autobiographical novel on a round-the-world jaunt aboard a ketch he designed himself – driven, on the one hand, by a work ethic that famously rivalled Martin’s and, on the other, by the need to keep himself in the fitfully profligate manner to which he had become accustomed since first striking literary gold in 1903, with Klondike canine tale The Call of the Wild. An incapacitating combination of toothache, bowel problems, and financial pressures cut short his voyage. He completed his manuscript in a funk of disenchantment on the way back to California as a passenger on the Mariposa – the very vessel (in name, at least) that he would contrive to have his strapping young protagonist, numbed to acclaim and affection, jump from at the novel’s abrupt conclusion: a terminal return to his natural element, and to the state of grace evoked by his surname. 

Luca Marinelli and Jessica Cressy in Martin Eden (photograph by Francesca Errichiello)

Martin Eden was a critical and commercial failure – too bleak by half for a public still enamoured of Horatio Alger. When it began to grow in stature in the 1920s, it was thanks in part to readers who drew inspiration from Martin and his Nietzschean will to knowledge – contra the author’s stated intent. A self-described socialist, London envisioned the book as a critique of unchecked individualism, not a how-to manual. And yet his literary alter ego, an idealist hopped-up on Herbert Spencer, proved too vivid and compelling an animation of London’s own libertarian streak for him to function as such. (See also Travis Bickle, Tony Montana – underdogs whose brash magnetism overwhelmed the cautionary aspect of the texts from which they sprang.) 

Marcello, together with co-writer Maurizio Braucci, may have transposed the story to his own home turf, and it could be said that he approached the film with a rigour worthy of his protagonist – taking on, as he typically has, the roles of producer and camera operator in addition to writer and director – but he would hold him at a greater distance than London, casting him in the totemic rather than autobiographical mould. Marcello presents a Naples that, despite the nostalgic patina of celluloid, is not the stomping ground of his youth but a kaleidoscopic composite of the so-called ‘short twentieth century’, and a Martin Eden who embodies the rise of the ‘absolute a-social individualism’ identified by Eric Hobsbawm as one of the defining, damning features of the period, all his mental imagery pulled from the archives.

But what an embodiment! Luca Marinelli, last seen in 2020 action flick The Old Guard (directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood) is magnificent in the title role, his beauty no artist’s illusion – even (or especially) in the film’s second part, shot six months after the first, at which point the formerly burnished countenance of our anti-hero has turned ashen, brown hair bleached and stringy, smile a bitter, nicotine-stained leer. The rot is positively decadent under Marcello’s Romanticist lens. Slumped on a chaise longue in a robe of purple silk, a cigarette stub dangling between his fingers, he is a washed-up glam rock star by way of Colonel Kurtz, over-indulged but unsatisfied, disgusted by his dream-come-true.

Martin Eden is showing in select cinemas from 18 June 2021.