CRITICAL. After her golden palm for “titanium”, Julia Ducournau signs a melo gore on a family struck by a frightening virus. But the film, in theaters this August 20, goes quickly in circles.
There was a priori everything to please, or disturb at least: a casting with small onions (Golshifteh Farahani, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, Emaciated Tahar Rahim, with about twenty kilos on the bones), a dramatic magnitude coupled with high potential gore (a blinding epidemic, which Visual (a virus that transforms those who catch it into a marbled statue, where the flesh becomes rocky and sandy; or blood, as generalized phobia).
But Julia Ducournau’s third feature film, eagerly awaited after her golden palm in 2021 for the brilliant Titaniumpresented in competition in Cannes this year, disappoints. Mayonnaise never really takes. It is even refrained as the plot advances. Stretch. Winds up in laudable Lynchéan inspirations, but failed (disorderly story, melancholy song in the background, long scene in a outdated red hotel). And in repetitive round trips between two temporalities.
Gore familial
Let us resume by the beginning. The intrigue: in the 1980s, Alpha (Mélissa Boros), a teenager with 13-year-old glasses, full of trauma, who likes to flirt with danger, lives alone in Le Havre with her mother, doctor-sausage (Golshifteh Farahani).
As a virus spreads and frightens the crowds, Alpha gets a big “A” on his shoulder. His mother fears that the needle has contaminated her and takes her to take exams. The duo then sees the mother’s brother-fanty, Amin (Tahar Rahim), adding to heroin and dug by bites.
The film then oscillates between family saga, gender learning story and apocalyptic fresco on AIDS (or any other pandemic). With in the middle, as always in Ducournau’s cinema (daughter of a gynecologist and a dermato for Oedipus followers), bodies filmed closely, damaged, mistreated, scarified. Sacrificed. Blood drips on skins, needles sting, hearts stop, fear lurks. A ceiling collapses slowly. A site staircase tangled in all directions.
These bodies try tenderness. They stick (hugs between the girl and the uncle, with mom, or between brother and sister), catch a hand, a ladybug or a syringe, dare some welcome caresses. But emotion does not arise.
Little interest
And that is where, it would be said, all the misfortune of the film. Despite the efforts made by the director and the actors, the characters hardly thicken as the (convoluted) scenario weaves her canvas. They lock themselves in a dysfunctional but heeled family shell (the mother in the first place), repeat their expressions and their troubles.
Then crumble like the reddish sand that hovers on Le Havre. On the contrary precisely of Titanium Who, beyond the gore scents, managed to probe and to touch the interiority of her murderous and blistering heroine.
On the theme of AIDS, nothing new either. The film depicts panic fear of contamination, paranoia, rejection (when Alpha is mocked by his classmates or when the hospital filters or even clearly refuses the sick), the confinement and isolation, the distrust of each other, the generalized suspicion. Homophobia too. Classic and without much interest. Alpha is therefore like the color of its image, too gray, too cold. Dull.
