To judge by the sudden peak of the allegories of AIDS at high concept which strike the circuit of the festival, it was the shock of Covid-19 which brought so much spirit of artists to this previous pandemic. In many ways, the handling errors of this crisis have taught us to approach subsequent epidemics in a more human way.
The first in competition at the Cannes Film Festival two years after “Titane” took the Palme d’Or, “Alpha” by Julia Ducournau is one of the three science fiction entries during the feast of this year in which an allegorical imaginary illness allows a filmmaker to revisit the trauma and the tragedy of the Sids crisis. (The other two are “the plague” and “the mysterious gaze of the flamingo”, not to mention recent films of the art house such as “Fairyland”, “We all the furthest” and “Jimpa”. Festival with a high -lived raw tattoo.
What did the needle look like? Was it clean or dirty? Alpha’s mother (Golshifteh Farahani) asks to know, her mind taking up the virus that transformed his brother as Toxicomia, Amin (an emaciated Tahar Rahim), in a marble statue about eight years earlier. This is what this particular disease does, which means that his victims counsel a chalky powder while their body slowly turns into a stone. Alpha was 5 years old when Amin was infected, and she can barely remember him now, confusing memories (shown in reddish gold) with the anxiety scenes with blue hues caused by his fear of the current virus. They are all mixed together as “dreams in dreams”, to quote the poem that Alpha hears in the English class.
Fearing that her daughter was infected, Alpha’s mother – who is a determined doctor to deal with this blood condition – the clinic precipitated for tetanus and blood tests. But this is the late 90s, and they have to wait several weeks for a more specific result. In the meantime, everyone in Alpha’s class at school seems to assume that it is infected … But why? Yes, HIV can be transmitted by contaminated needles, although I do not remember anyone who was ostracized to have a tattoo in the 90s.
Ducournau designed “Alpha” as another body of corporeal corlor in a work that includes “raw” (about reconciling with cannibalism) and “titanium” (a more complicated case to learn to accept the monster inside). Although the three films have adolescents overwhelmed by inexplicable changes, “Alpha” is not like the others insofar as the character has not yet reached puberty. She has a boyfriend, in a way, in her classmate Adrien (Louai El Amrousy), although Alpha is wise to deny her sex – the young immature man does not show solidarity with her at school, and sees another girl in addition.
Perhaps not so much known to the global public, French-speaking actors Farahani (“Paterson”) and Rahim (“a prophet”) rank among the most gifted artists of their generation. Ducournau puts them both through the ringing here, calling Rahim to lose a surprising quantity of weight – the transformation competes with the transformation of “Joker” – and Farahani to play a sister who refuses to abandon the lost well -being killing herself before her eyes.
It is painful to see such talents relax in roles which are quite common, if not cliché by independent American standards (imagine the unconditional father-son dynamic seen in “handsome boy” crossed with the punitive degradation of “Requiem for a Dream”). Is it a film on dependence or AIDS? Does Alpha face a fear of infection or the unreasonable burden of all the anxieties of his mother? During a visit to the hospital, she sees her English teacher (Finnegan Oldfield) and her infected partner in the waiting room, responding with the kind of empathy that Ducournau tries to get us. But it is not fair for Alpha so that she is the only one to realize what happened when she saw him later cry in class.
“I’m too young!” Alpha finally says to his mother, articulating what the public probably felt the whole film: that it is unreasonable to put this kind of pressure on a 13 -year -old child. And what about the repellant opening shooting, which zooms in traces of the traces on Amin’s arm to find the 5 year old alpha using a marker to retrace a kind of constellation on his skin. “I caught something,” he said, opening his hand to reveal a ladybug – but if your ear records a double sense, you are two hours ahead of a film that finds several times on this scene.
In “RAW” and “Titane”, Ducournau has also forced the public to look in the dark and putrefied corners of our own psyche, but that no longer seems reasonable when a child (or a child actor, by the way) is shown by crying next to the corpse of his beloved. And what should we do with incoherent scenes like the one where Amin draws Alpha from the bed and takes him to a set of spirals of bad journey for “The Mercy Seat” by Nick Cave? Using us with its too high sound design, Ducourournenau actually evokes the 90 -year -old troubled paranoia, when the intimidators used homophobic insults and bleeding in a public swimming pool could trigger panic.
Alas, nothing here is even as disturbing as the cavalier transmission of HIV that Larry Clark represented in “children” – although a sex scene involving condoms is always overwhelming, in the light of the age of Alpha. It would have been more powerful if Ducournau had treated directly with AIDS, rather than a process that puts the flesh in marble, before dissolving in dust. In the end, this surrealist fossilization process is so charming that it inadvertently undermines the horrors that have preceded, providing a cathartic image with which the Ducournau nightmare wrap.
