Presented in the official selection, Julia Ducournau's last film was expected at the turn of the Cannes Film Festival. The critics ofTitanium, 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,Alphadegoulin of failed intentions and decalated emotionsad nauseamin 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 thatAlphaor 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 notTitanium(read ourcritical), 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 forSerious, 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 fromPortisheadto 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) and Alpha (A) are the two facets of the same piece (subtility...), the first of which is substance abuse, the second of which is HIV with the common denominator of the trauma circulating like a virus. Either, but still it was necessary to treat this universe which is cruelly lacking credit. Between the four walls of the family home, we suffocate like his young heroine caught up in his childhood memories intertwined between dream and reality, two dimensions of a confusing inspiration of nullity. Subtlety is lacking throughout a feature film that too often takes itself seriously. One blows again and again in front of Amin who manages without ever believing in his addiction. The actor Tahar Rahim, though thin as a nail for the needs of the film, struggles to convince. Julia Ducournau filmed her subjects without leaving them breaths unlike the staggered scenes of the duo Agathe Roussel / Vincent Lindon deTitanium. Not a shadow of a burst inAlpha.
What happened to the rage of a director who, if she wanted to cross the themes of therapeutic harassment and AIDS treatment, could have been so bolder? Recently, the very experimentalElse Thibault Emin treated confinement with more ingenuity, combining humour with tragedy. Druillet and his cult comic book entitledNightwhere each flowered word of the author, bruised by the disappearance of his wife who died of cancer, was a torpedo to the medical profession.
Desperate by a story that will never take off, it's hard to find something to pull together. The photograph oscillating between blue and orange tones does not convince more than the frame of an axe-cut plot. «Well, when does he die Amin?» Did I ask myself more than once when watching the trotter play spinner on the dial of my watch. If the trauma of the pandemic continues to generate replicas in the seventh Art, go your way withAlphaand prefer himThe Plague, Charlie Polinger's first feature film that ticks all the boxes, whereAlphafails royally. Still the impression of imposture and doubt about the upcoming projects of a filmmaker who has become a winner of the Palm Gold perhaps in haste.
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