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Judging by the sudden spike in high-concept AIDS allegories hitting the festival circuit, it must have been the shock of COVID-19 that sent so many artists’ minds racing back to that previous pandemic. In many ways, the mistakes in handling that crisis taught us how to approach subsequent outbreaks in a more humane way.
Premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival two years after “Titane” took the Palme d’Or, Julia Ducournau’s “Alpha” is one of three science fiction entries at this year’s fest in which an imaginary, allegorical illness allows a filmmaker to revisit the trauma and tragedy of the AIDS crisis. (The other two are “The Plague” and “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” not to mention such recent art-house films as “Fairyland,” “All of Us Strangers” and “Jimpa.”) “Alpha” is by far the most exasperating of these movies, at once bluntly obvious and maddeningly unclear, taking as its protagonist a 13-year-old girl (Mélissa Boros) who comes home from a party with a crude homemade tattoo.
What was the needle like? Was it clean or dirty? Alpha’s mom (Golshifteh Farahani) demands to know, her mind racing back to the virus that turned her drug-addict brother, Amin (an emaciated Tahar Rahim), into a marble statue roughly eight years before. That’s what this particular disease does, causing its victims to cough a chalky powder as their bodies slowly turn to stone. Alpha was 5 when Amin was infected, and she can barely remember him now, confusing memories (shown in reddish gold) with the blue-hued scenes of anxiety brought on by her present virus scare. They’re all jumbled together as “dreams within dreams,” to quote the poem Alpha hears in English class.
Fearing that her daughter may have been infected, Alpha’s mother — who is a medical doctor committed to treating this blood-borne condition — rushes her to the clinic for tetanus shots and blood tests. But it’s the late ’90s, and they must wait several weeks for a more accurate result. In the meantime, everyone in Alpha’s class at school seems to assume that she’s infected … but why? Yes, HIV can be transmitted by contaminated needles, though I don’t recall anyone being ostracized for getting a tattoo in the ’90s.
Ducournau has conceived “Alpha” as another body-horror movie in an oeuvre that includes “Raw” (about coming to terms with cannibalism) and “Titane” (a more complicated case of learning to accept the monster within). Though all three films feature adolescents overwhelmed by inexplicable changes, “Alpha” is not like the others in that the character has yet to hit puberty. She has a boyfriend, sort of, in her classmate Adrien (Louai El Amrousy), though Alpha’s wise to deny him sex — the immature young man shows zero solidarity toward her at school, and is seeing another girl besides.
Perhaps not so widely known to global audiences, French-speaking actors Farahani (“Paterson”) and Rahim (“A Prophet”) rank among the most gifted performers of their generation. Ducournau puts them both through the ringer here, calling on Rahim to lose a startling amount of weight — the transformation rivals Joaquin Phoenix’s for “Joker” — and Farahani to play a sister who refuses to give up on the lost-cause loved one killing himself before her eyes.
It’s painful to watch such talents pour so much into roles that are fairly common, if not clichéd by American indie standards (picture the unconditional father-son dynamic seen in “Beautiful Boy” crossed with the punishing degradation of “Requiem for a Dream”). Is this a movie about addiction or AIDS? Is Alpha coping with a fear of infection or the unreasonable burden of all her mother’s anxieties? On a visit to the hospital, she sees her English teacher (Finnegan Oldfield) and his infected partner in the waiting room, responding with the kind of empathy Ducournau is trying to elicit from us. But it’s not fair to Alpha for her to be the only one to realize what’s happened when she later sees him crying in class.
“I’m too young!” Alpha finally tells her mom, articulating what audiences have likely felt the entire film: that it’s unreasonable to put this kind of pressure on a 13-year-old. And what of the repellent opening shot, which zooms out from the track marks on Amin’s arm to find 5-year-old Alpha using a marker to trace a constellation of sorts across his skin. “I’ve caught something,” he tells her, opening his hand to reveal a ladybug — but if your ear registers a double meaning, you’re two hours ahead of a film that repeatedly finds its way back to this scene.
In “Raw” and “Titane,” Ducournau also forced audiences to stare into the dark, putrefied corners of our own psyches, but that no longer seems reasonable when a child (or a child actor, for that matter) is shown crying beside the corpse of her loved one. And what are we to make of incoherent scenes like the one where Amin pulls Alpha from bed and takes her on a bad-trip spiral set to Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat”? Suffocating us with her too-loud sound design, Ducournau effectively evokes the murky paranoia of the ’90s, when bullies used homophobic slurs and bleeding in a public pool might set off panic.
Alas, nothing here is even remotely as disturbing as the cavalier transmission of HIV that Larry Clark depicted in “Kids” — although a sex scene involving condoms is still upsetting, in light of Alpha’s age. It would have been more powerful if Ducournau had dealt with AIDS directly, rather than a process that mutates flesh into marble, before dissolving away into dust. In the end, this surreal fossilization process is so lovely, it inadvertently undermines the horrors that have come before, providing a cathartic image with which to wrap Ducournau’s nightmare.
English (US) ·