alpha (w&d julia ducournau)

The critics have not been overly kind to Alpha. It is indeed, a messy film, so full of ideas and concepts that they seem to overflow. There’s a pandemic storyline, as society becomes gripped by a disease which turns people to crumbling stone. There’s a junkie storyline, as Amin, played by Tahar Rahim, struggles with his addiction. There’s a double timeline, with teenage Alpha and young Alpha living side by side within the film’s framework. Gradually we piece together that the pandemic scenes, with Alpha’s heroic mother, Golshifteh Farahani, sporting a different hairdo, happened in young Alpha’s past. There’s a coming of age storyline, as Alpha, (Mélissa Boros) fights for her independence and tries to reconcile with the family ghosts. There are loose strands featuring the anglo-french actors Finnegan Oldfield and Emma Mackey, which feel as though they might even have been included to keep the financiers happy. Finally, there are some great moments where the director explores her Berber heritage, a heritage from which Alpha feels alienated. The red wind whose myth permeates the film clearly has a saharan origin. So there is a lot going on, probably far too much and even more so than with Titane, one feels that the director might benefit from working with a screenwriter…. But none of this means that Alpha makes for anything less than a fascinating, visceral ride. As ever with Ducournau, there’s a vigour and energy to the filmmaking which propels the film over the course of its two hours, no matter how many highways and byways it goes down. It’s not perfect, but then who is?

 

titane (w&d julia ducournau)

Interesting to see Titane after having seen two Carax films recently. Titane feels as though it’s the bastard child of Carax, who in turn is the bastard child of high-Godard. Perhaps throwing a few garlands in the direction of Clare Dennis whilst we’re at it. Which is perhaps another way of saying that the film, for all its stylised violence and energetic gender politics, has a classically French feel. It is a dislocated narrative of the image, rather than the coherent narrative of story. Even the unifying structural line, which is Alexia’s pregnancy, is constantly interrupted by scenes where she doesn’t appear to be in the least bit pregnant, contrasted with other scenes where her pregnant belly is displayed in all its glory.

The effect is a film which is stitched together by image and shock. A Rumsfeldian bravura, which is at its goriest in the opening half hour. The audience is rapidly crowbarred into submission and thereafter meekly surrenders to the director’s caprices. We just want to get out unscathed and whenever the tone changes towards something that hints of warmth or humanity, we are duly grateful.

Through this there emerges the line of Alexia’s complex (to say the least) relationship with the automobile. Which firstly scars her for life, then goads her into killing, seduces her and finally becomes the father of her child. This child, like Alexia, is far from standard operating procedure. The child will be a hybrid, part machine, part human, like Alexia herself. On one level Titane could be viewed as an eco parable - this is what our petrolised world has done to humanity, ripping out the love. Or it could also be read, conversely, as a paean to the dying petro-culture, the sleek, erotic age of the car, which is on the wane. There is also, clearly, many a dissertation to be written on Alexia’s pregnancy, the film’s elemental treatment of a process which rarely gets the cinematic dues it deserves. Titane´s capacity for interpretation, its openness, is part of its Gallic appeal.

Finally, a feeling which was exacerbated by walking through the Reina Sofia the following day, Titane also belongs to a surrealist tradition. Bending the framework of the body to fit the artist’s vision of a world which has become disconnected from its natural roots. A hundred years ago, as the world entered a period of terrible change, surrealism emerged as a methodology for communicating what it was like to inhabit this change. Now, in an era of bio-politics and gender fluidity, all the old certainties of liberalism going up in smoke, perhaps surrealism once again is the most exact science for seeking to engage with our brave new world.