‘Alpha’: ‘Titane’ Director Gets Lost in Her Metaphor on Heroin and AIDS | Cinema: previews and reviews

The body and the flesh are the cinema laboratory of the French Julia Ducournau. In his debut film, Rawit was about a cannibalistic girl raised by vegetarians who discovers her appetite for human entrails with her sexual awakening. In his second feature film, winner of the Palme d’Or Titanflesh and metal fused, in ecstatic communion, under the mutant body of a serial killer. And in the third, which is now being released under the sign of that success, Ducournau also reinvents the AIDS epidemic through another female character and mutating bodies, ghosts of stone and dust around a desolate memory.

While it sounds good, the metaphor doesn’t quite work for Ducournau, who gets lost in a teenage and family drama with a heroin overdose in the background. Alpha is the name of the protagonist, a thirteen-year-old misfit who lives alone with her doctor mother until, mysteriously, her uncle, her mother’s heroin addict brother, moves in with them. The stigma of the needle torments the teenager, who goes through life as a sort of shadow of his uncle’s illness.

AS PilgrimageCarla Simón’s film, Alpha through fantasy he confronts the generation that fell without a net into heroin addiction, but in his journey into the past Ducournau does the opposite of Simón and in his commitment to the poetics of heroin body horror He wallows in the most morbid memories. The film, for example, opens with a microscopic shot of a crater-sized wound in the crook of a man’s arm as a needle finds its way, and far from the gruesome detail, a girl is seen drawing a line between the pecks on the same arm as if playing connect-the-dots.

Although excess is part of his vision, Ducournau’s penchant for visual truculence does not find its meaning this time and the film disintegrates like the bodies of its story. Ducournau delves into adult pain through Alpha’s innocence, but the uncle-mother-niece triangle is unbalanced and if it continues it is largely due to the formidable acting work of Tahar Rahim and his transformation into an eighties drug addict.

Rahim manages to be and not be at the same time; His helplessness is touching, but without hiding his diabolical side. He is the poor ghost of a man who was once handsome and charming, and who now has only his sister and his niece. Faced with this, Alpha It gets lost along the way with the protagonist’s high school conflicts or with much of the background family drama. In his new sterile attempt, Ducournau is missing something more important than meat.