‘Martin Eden’ Trailer: One of the Year’s Best Films Transplants Jack London to Italy

Ryan Lattanzio
·2 min read

More than a year after the film premiered at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, Pietro Marcello’s masterful Italian drama “Martin Eden” finally is coming to U.S. shores. Opening in select theaters and in virtual cinemas on October 16 from Kino Lorber, “Martin Eden” stars Luca Marinelli as a disaffected working-class man with dreams of being a writer who is caught up in a politically fractious moment for his country. IndieWire shares the exclusive full U.S. trailer for the film below.

Here’s the official synopsis: “Adapted from a 1909 novel by Jack London yet set in a provocatively unspecified moment in Italy’s history, Martin Eden is a passionate and enthralling narrative fresco in the tradition of the great Italian classics. Martin (played by the marvelously committed Luca Marinelli) is a self-taught proletarian 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 dissatisfactions of working-class toil and bourgeois success lead to political awakening and destructive anxiety in this enveloping, superbly mounted bildungsroman.”

Marinelli recently gained notices for his turn in Netflix’s “The Old Guard.” At Venice when “Martin Eden” premiered, he won the Best Actor prize. The movie won the Best Adapted Screenplay prize at the David di Donatello Awards for writers Maurizio Braucci and Pietro Marcello, adapting London’s text, and was nominated for a handful of others including Best Film and Best Actor. At the Toronto International Film Festival last year, “Martin Eden” won the Platform prize.

From IndieWire’s 2019 Venice review: “Marcello never misses an opportunity to emphasize that schools only teach people how to pass society’s meaningless tests. Given how smart Martin is right from the start, it’s a wonder that it takes him so long to pick up on that. Played with bruising pluck by Luca Marinelli (think Jake Gyllenhaal with a lower voice and rougher edges), Martin is a boisterous sailor blinded by his own ambition. And by the beauty of Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy, whose piercing blue eyes bestow her character with a perfect ambivalence), the hyper-bourgeois girl whose brother our street-smart hero saves from a beating.”

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