ALICE ET MARTIN (director: André Téchiné; screenwriters: Olivier Assayas/Gilles Taurand; cinematographer: Caroline Champetier; editor: Martine Giordano; cast: Juliette Binoche (Alice), Alexis Loret (Martin Sauvagnac), Mathieu Amalric (Benjamin Sauvagnac), Carmen Maura (Jeanine Sauvagnac), Jean-Pierre Lorit (Frédéric Sauvagnac), Jeremy Kreikenmayer (Martin as a child), Pierre Maguelon (Victor Suavagnac), Marthe Villalonga (Lucie); Runtime: 123; 1998-France)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
André Techiné (Wild Reeds/Ma Saison Préférée) has come up with another of his art-house films, guaranteed to dazzle the senses, featuring Caroline Champetier's beautiful camera work of the colorful meadows of southern France, a stupendously gorgeous and magical shot of a troubled child opening up the shutters in his room to a dark sky of bubbly snowflakes, and of the steel blue skies of Paris setting a sober background mood for those busy jump-starting their struggling careers in the bustling city.
This dysfunctional family tale, is told mainly through the eyes of an emotionally disturbed bastard son, Martin (Loret). He is first seen after growing up for his first 10 years with his earthy, beautician mother, Jeanine (Carmen Maura) and then brought to live with his real, well-off, philandering industrialist father, Victor (Maguelon), his stolid wife (Marthe Villalonga), and his three half-brothers. He hates living with his father since he believes his father doesn't want him.
The film will uncover the secrets in his life that causes him to have a nervous breakdown. It will show the relationship he has with his family and with his lover, Alice (Binoche), and how tortured with self-hatred he becomes trying to judge himself and find his soul, tormented about a guilt that is gnawing at him after his father dies and he runs away from home.
Love and guilt become the two obstacles in the young man's troubled life, and the answers he seeks are imponderable but the reasons for his breakdown seem on the surface like they are out of a Freudian psychology 101 college course. The director is ultimately asking the viewer to be the judge, as he seems too preoccupied with painting his canvas with a love that gets stuck somewhere between a lustful sexual romp and one of pathos. What results in an incomplete ending for a film that can't stand clarity except in its photography and its affection for the three flawed main characters (Alice, Martin, and Benjamin). The story seemed jarring at times, its inexorable rhythms and its lack of dialogue seemed out of place with the attempt made in tracking each character down in depth. Yet the film seems to work best when it was in a state of murkiness. When things started clearing up and the characters become who we think they were, the big secret doesn't seem that surprising, but how it is handled seems bizarre though not fully credible, as it is perplexing why the main character is so concerned with finding out something about himself that will cause him so much pain when he doesn't have to. Yet there is something about this film that is more than meets the eye, even though the film left me unsatisfied, it was still so well-crafted, that I found myself liking it better than I first thought I did.
The film does not necessarily go in chronological order, thereby the flashbacks that come without order, are meant to give weight to the story as presented at the time, and will give this rather conventional unhappy family story line a feeling of much more mystery than is needed. The film does succeed in exposing the wounds of jealousy, obsessive love, and atavistic demands. But it's too melodramatic, the guilt motivation seems too illogical, and the half-baked psychology fails to explain its characters for it too fully work as drama. The actors were all sweating their lines to make it seem as if they had to dig deep to come up with a gem here and there, but their performances were all finely tuned and seemed to add to the film's need to have confusion be its guiding light. What keeps this film going, is the way it keeps the emotional pot boiling, and just when you are ready to give up on it as merely sitcom stuff, the film bounces back from its wordless silence and halting love dramatics to boil over with fits of liberating agony.
The film kicks into high gear when the grown Martin runs out of the prison-like gates of his tyrannical father's house, as he just pushed him down the stairs accidently killing him. He then lives for three weeks on the run as a fugitive in the countryside, where he watches a dead deer carcass being devoured by carrion, tries unsuccessfully to drown himself, and gets caught by a farmer stealing his eggs from a chicken coop, as his father's wife pays his fine to release him from prison. There was no dialogue to explain why he's a fugitive or what's on his mind. Martin then heads to the Paris apartment of his homosexual half-brother Benjamin (Amalric) and his tense violinist roomate Alice. Here, he becomes inarticulate, still with the wild look of someone who is being hunted down.
The pretty-boy Martin becomes sexually obsessed with the neurotic Alice, he even gets caught stalking her, but she sticks to her safe Platonic relationship with the aspiring actor Benjamin, who is currently supporting himself by being a store security guard, even though she is tempted by him sexually, nothing romantically transpires-though she is flattered by the attention. But when he moves out and becomes a well-established male model in the fashion world, with pictures of him on advertising posters all over Paris, things begin to change. He then gives her the ultimatum that he wants her or else he won't see her again. She turns down this proposal, but with a look more of sadness than of love, she goes to him and says, "Take me, I'm yours if you want me." Martin takes her to bed and the inexperienced lover makes up for lost time as a virgin.
The trouble they soon experience comes twofold, Benjamin goes into a jealous snit that he lost what is his and, secondly, when she tells Martin that he's going to be a daddy, he goes into a coma and when he comes out of that, the boy checks himself into an asylum, where the drums beating in his head are what drive men crazy. It seems that the possibility of him being a father triggered off memories of the guilt he is living with and can't cope with. Alice decides she loves the guy and will stand-by him no matter what, and in order to understand him, she returns to see his two mothers, and tries to find out what is bothering her man.
You have to stick with this one and not get too perturbed by the unsatisfying finale to see this one through and then, you might feel its emotional grip growing on you. It's a pure cinematic vehicle, where the pictures tell the story better than the story seems to be told. There was a strangely felt wry humor that underscored the dead serious mood the film had. Alexis Loret, in his debut film role, gives an interesting performance of someone who is always out of place no matter where he is. But, when it comes to the heavy romance, I didn't feel that this romance was as deep as portrayed. Though the director might have implied it had more going for it than sexual gratification, I saw no other convincing reason for the romance. It could be asserted that maternal instincts, soul searching, and misplaced pathos on Juliette's part were responsible for the romance, but I couldn't see any other reason but the libido. Martin was just not a warm enough character to believe he could generate so much unconditional love.
REVIEWED ON 9/12/2000 GRADE: B-
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
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