Presented in the official selection, Julia Ducournau's last film was expected at the turn of the Cannes Film Festival. The critics of Titanium, polemic palm gold of 2021, had already prepared the machine gun. Alpha, a 13-year-old who lives alone with her mother, gets tattooed an A on an evening she comes back from. He then engaged a three-piece puzzle (the nursing mother, the traumatized daughter and the toxic brother) gathered together with a hammer. With this third film, the French filmmaker leaves behind and competes in the title of the palm of boredom. Disparaging and poorly articulated film, Alpha degoulin of failed intentions and decalated emotions ad nauseam in a work as long as sterile. We're frying the banana.
The world after...
There are sessions where time seems to be suspended, such as a moment of grace when the daily's hassles pass away and the Earth could stop turning as long as the film follows its course; There are others where time dilates to infinity for otherwise less flattering reasons. Two hours and eight minutes of feature film exactly, all punctuated with the same script loops where each arc seems to turn empty. But what happened so thatAlpha or missed? After her first sequence, where the young teenager, played by Mélissa Boros, was discovered, the film is locked in a symbolic narrative that seeks, without success, to draw the tears of her spectator, dismayed by such a waste.
It's not even that it's smart (if only), it's that it's so leaned that it feels like Julia Ducournau thinks we're balls. Between this pandemic world where the victims are petrified in marble and its battery of characters that convince no one, one navigates through a turbulent sea, always close to capsized. Ducournau led his boat to the final shipwreck during an epilogue that was even more distressing than the rest of the film. It must be said that we are not spoiled between the mother (Golshifteh Farahani) who is doing an umpteenth heart massage to her addicted brother Amin to resurrect him and this meaningless hospital, where the shadows of covid and AIDS are flat. Absolutely nothing seems to have been thought of to hold the spectator in breath.
Whether you like it or not Titanium (read our critical), recognize that there was food, and the refractories could at least console themselves in front of the great-guiignolesque spectacle of the introductory massacre. Same for Serious, certainly the director's most direct and least poser film. Here the rhythm is exasperating platitude, where the complexity of the facade hides ampulated symbols and all the more misdigested as they are worn by a melodramatic OST ranging from Portishead to dusty and tearing piano notes. Alpha got tattooed with a dirty needle. The Hic, we are in the midst of a pandemic inspired by the AIDS epidemic which, it seems, has greatly influenced the director in her youth. Julia Ducournau tells the story « the absolute violence that was inflicted on AIDS patients in the 1980s-1990s » during an interview that leaves no room for doubt.
« The mirror that has been sent away from society, stigmatizing the sick, is a trauma of which it is impossible to mourn [...]. One could hear that it was their fault, that they were sinners and that they deserved what was happening to them. My film talks about this contamination of fear, which was the real trauma for me. »
Oh hey oh hey Captain abandoned
Amin (A) et Alpha (A) sont les deux facettes d’une même pièce (subtilité…), le premier figurant la toxicomanie, la seconde le VIH avec pour dénominateur commun le traumatisme qui circule comme un virus. Soit, mais encore eut-il fallu soigner cet univers qui manque cruellement de crédit. Entre les quatre murs du foyer familial, on suffoque comme sa jeune héroïne rattrapée par ses souvenirs d’enfance entremêlés entre songe et réalité, deux dimensions d’une inspiration confondante de nullité. La subtilité fait défaut tout au long d’un long-métrage qui se prend trop souvent au sérieux. On souffle encore et encore devant Amin qui gesticule sans jamais qu’on ne croie à son addiction. L’acteur Tahar Rahim, quoique maigre comme un clou pour les besoins du film, peine à convaincre. Julia Ducournau filme ses sujets sans leur laisser de respirations contrairement aux scènes décalées du duo Agathe Roussel / Vincent Lindon de Titanium. Pas l’ombre d’un sursaut dans Alpha.
Où est passée la rage d’une réalisatrice qui, si elle voulait croiser les thèmes de l’acharnement thérapeutique et du traitement du sida, auraient pu faire preuve de tellement plus d’audace ? Récemment, le très expérimental Else de Thibault Emin traitait du confinement avec autrement plus d’ingéniosité, mariant l’humour à la tragédie. On pense aussi à Druillet et sa BD culte intitulée La nuit où chaque mot fleuri de l’auteur, meurtri par la disparition de sa femme décédée d’un cancer, était une torpille lancée au corps médical.
Désespéré par une histoire qui ne décollera jamais, on peine à trouver de quoi se ressaisir. La photographie oscillant entre des tons bleutés et orangés ne convainc pas plus que le cadre d’une intrigue taillée à la hache. « Bon, c’est quand qu’il meurt Amin ? » me suis-je demandé plus d’une fois en regardant la trotteuse jouer à tournicoton sur le cadran de ma montre. Si le traumatisme de la pandémie continue de générer des répliques dans le septième Art, passez votre chemin avec Alpha et préférez-lui The Plague, le premier long-métrage de Charlie Polinger qui coche toutes les cases, là où Alpha échoue royalement. Reste le sentiment d’imposture et le doute sur les prochains projets d’une cinéaste devenue lauréate de la palme d’or peut-être à la hâte.
Subscribe
Connection
0 Remarks
oldest
