In 2016, Julia Ducournau arrived with a bang in the film world with her sensual coming-of-age cannibal horror drama Raw. She then took the top prize at Cannes five years later with her second feature, Titane, which featured a woman having sex with a Cadillac.
It seems a fair question, then: "Where do you go from here?" The French director and screenwriter smiles and hesitates for a moment before she admits that Alpha, her latest exploration of body horror, might not be the follow up film everyone was expecting but is clearly her most personal work yet.
It's a family drama infused with the paranoia elicited by a viral pandemic. In an undefined French town sometime in the 1990s, a deadly virus called Red Wind is decimating the population. Transmitted through blood and needles, it transforms its victims into living statues of marble until they die and their bodies lliterally crumble to dust in the wind.
The focus is on 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros), pictured above, who spontaneously gets her arm tattooed at a party. When she finds out, Alpha's mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a Berber immigrant and doctor in a hospital besieged by anxious or doomed patients, understandably panics. Soon Alpha's body begins to change. She bleeds repeatedly, causing her classmates to shun her.
Her uncle, Amin (Tahar Rahim), meanwhile moves in with mother and daughter. They haven't seen each other for years, and Alpha doesn't remember him. A drug addict who has infected himself with the virus, he has returned to be cared for by his sister.
When Ducournau talks about the film, she feels an urge to explain herself, reflecting the vulnerability that she shares with her characters – whom she defends to the hilt.
PAMELA JAHN: Did you get a tattoo as a teenager like Alpha at the beginning of the film?
JULIA DUCOURNAU: I do have tattoos, but I never got scalded by my parents – I got my first when I was 26. But it's a good point because what's important in the film is the fact that Alpha is only 13. And, what’s more, she's passed out when it happens. That's the worst part for me. What I was trying to show in the scene is that she's a kid who is testing her boundaries. The issue is that she lives in a world that is also reaching its own limits.
The emotion of the scene is intensified by your choice of music. Portishead’s "Roads" is a powerful song, haunting and devastating at the same time.
To me, it's a song that encompasses the feeling of the 1990s - of a young generation that doesn't really foresee a future; [these kids] try to numb themselves to the present because they live in world where everyone's dying. It's not a coincidence that grunge was such a major movement at the time; it was an extremely fatalistic and pessimistic rock movement. It was really all about the pain of the present.
Is that how you remember the decade yourself?
That's how I lived through it. I have pretty dark memories of that time, partially because of the AIDS pandemic, but mostly because of what it stirred: that feeling of living in a world that was extremely lonely, unfair, unjust, and immoral. All that fear around AIDS was generating a lot of rejection, a lot of hate, but also ostracization. It really felt like people were disposable. And worse than that, society made anyone affected feel that they were accountable for what was happening to them. I have a sense that homophobia, xenophobia, and misogyny at the time was very, very uninhibited, way more than it is today.
There's an interesting contradiction in the film in terms of the way you portray the matter-of-factness of the illness compared to the beauty of the crumbling marble bodies.
I'm going to pick up on the word beauty, because it was at the core of my reflection when I was writing the film, especially when I had the first ideas for the iconography of the disease that I would create. My initial reaction was very naive. I thought I must make [the dying people] beautiful. I wanted to fight for them, to give them a form of social redemption. I wanted everyone to see them as individuals and not as marginals. But then I realised the concept of beauty is very tricky in art in general, but especially in that context because beauty is very subjective. Eventually, I felt that the only thing that matters is my characters' points of view, not mine.
You mean the mother's character in particular?
Yes. The first time that we see the patients is through the caring gesture of Alpha's mother. She brings them food and apologises to them for the lack of duty that the rest of the hospital shows. From the get-go, they are shown as human beings who are in need of care. It was very important for me not to create a happening around them, but instead to discover them through the eyes of someone who acknowledges them for who they are.
Where did you get the idea of showing their bodies turning to marble?
It came quite naturally to me as soon as I got out of the beauty conundrum, because marble is a very noble material. It's used to sculpt saints or sanctify kings. It's a material very much linked to sacredness. To me, it seemed like a good way to elevate the lives and the deaths of those who have been deemed unworthy or marginalised by society, because I believe that sacredness is within us all. I wanted to build a kind of monument to their memory, but also to give them the attention and the respect and the dignity that they deserved.
On the other hand, marble is frequently connected to death.
It's true, but I don't see that as a contradiction. I would maybe call it an oxymoron. Life doesn't go without death, beauty doesn't go without pain, light doesn't go without darkness. But there is another point to this: In Titane, I used metal, because it is mutable. If you put it in fire, it can become liquid. It's a very lively material. It's full of life. That's what I wanted to show in that film with the baby at the end, the birth of a new humanity that was stronger and more adaptable, somewhat transhuman. In Alpha, it's the opposite. Stone can only become dust, but it's still mineral.
Do you relate more to Alpha's mother than to Alpha herself?
The POV that presides in the film is Alpha’s. That said, I do very much feel connected to her mother's character in all her contradictions. I tend to love my characters more for their struggles than for their qualities. The mother touches me because she's the most contradictory character. She's someone who's both incredibly rational and unreasonable, someone who is both brave and yet eaten alive by her fears when it comes to her loved ones. She's like a golem, a creature with clay feet that make it seem strong and grounded but, at the same time, is very vulnerable.
Why did you use flashbacks that deliberately confuse the film's timeline?
Unconsciously, when I was shooting and editing the film, I felt that Alpha's POV could preside for the entire film, that it could also be the POV of the flashbacks when she wasn't there. What I was trying to achieve is that the whole film could be seen as an effort or work on memory. In that way, what we see in the flashbacks could be seen as Alpha's attempt to connect the dots between what she knows, what she imagines, what she's been told, to create the mythology of her family. Where the actual truth lies, I really don't care, to be honest.
Alpha is an outsider in her own family because she doesn't speak Arabic.
I don't see it as a form of exclusion. It's something that is quite heartfelt coming from me in the sense that it relates to my own situation. I didn't speak the same language as my grandparents, who spoke [a] Berber [language], but we would still understand each other. I've always wondered how it was even possible. But I think there is something very animal in the love you share with your family. If my grandma was mad at me for something, I would know exactly why. If she was praising me for something, I would understand. I'm fascinated by the mysterious ways that love takes sometimes.
Alpha does seem lonely though, doesn't she?
When you come from a double culture and you're a teenager, you feel that you belong nowhere. You don't know where to anchor yourself; it feels like everything is seeping through your fingers. It can be a very lonely place. Although Alpha is not excluded from her family, she does feel lost sometimes. It's a matter of not belonging, though, rather than loneliness.
The way you use physicality and violence in the film is different this time. Has your perception of how you see and use bodies changed over the three films that you've made so far?
Yes and no, because I've made a pledge to myself that I would always portray bodies in their entire rawness and truth, without glamour or any form of sugar-coating. I always film bodies with love, because I believe that, for most people, the body is a place of taboo. To me, this vulnerability should be shared and shown because it's like an umbilical cord that connects us all.
But what is different about Alpha for you?
The tenderness is definitely more prominent, and the body doesn't serve the grammar of the [body horror] genre this time. Even though my imagination always leans toward the genre, I do consider Alpha to be a drama in the first instance. There is a form of mutation happening in the film, but I want the audience to feel very close to it. I didn't intend to catheterise unreal or irrational fears through it. It's really a matter of where you place the cursor. Here, I didn't use the body for shock value at all. In fact, I tried to do the opposite.
Add comment