by James Mottram
“I would say that I’m a decent human being with a decent amount of nightmares,” says Julia Ducournau, the French director behind cannibal drama Raw and the Cannes-winning scabrous slice of auto-erotica Titane.
“It’s very, very healthy to have nightmares,” she continues. “It’s the way your mind purges things. These are actually a very healthy way to deal with our darkest parts. And we all have very dark parts that we need in order to be a functional human being who’s going to be good to others.”
Ducournau’s latest film, Alpha, feels like your very worst nightmare. The focus is a 13-year-old girl, Alpha (Mélissa Boros), who lives in an alternate 1990s Paris, at a time when a widespread virus – turning those who contract it into ghostly-white cadavers – is plaguing the population. As she returns from a party with a homemade ‘A’ tattooed into her arm, her medic mother (Golshifteh Farahani) fears the worst, concerned that her daughter may have caught something from a dirty needle.
While the highly transmittable COVID-19 might leap to mind, the director was actually thinking about the AIDS virus that blighted the world in the 1980s and ’90s. “No one would talk about it,” she says. “It was not only about protecting the children – a good intention – but also created a lot of fear in my generation, because that’s when you feel that the adults are lying to you. You think that the danger is imminent. That they [AIDS victims] were shunned out of society and shamed for it … is something that we have never really talked about. I think it’s not a good mirror for humanity.”
In Alpha, the emotional grist of the story comes between the titular girl and her relationship with her uncle, Amin (A Prophet star Tahar Rahim), a drug addict who may or may not have this body-destroying virus. Rahim lost 20 kilos to play the role, though he swears that he didn’t take any tips from his Napoleon co-star Joaquin Phoenix, who similarly transformed into a cadaver-like shell for Joker. “I like to go in my own bubble and do my stuff,” Rahim says. “I mean, it’s not Arthur Fleck. This is a different, different character.”
Nevertheless, Rahim knew he’d have to lose weight in extremis. “Of course, I needed to look like the character. I knew Julia’s body of work. There’s a physical aspect that she transcends, when she feels body and shape. So, I knew how important it was.” Working with a medical team, he spent three months losing the weight, two months maintaining it as he shot, and weeks gradually putting it back on.
“You’ve got to be careful,” he says. “But one night, I couldn’t help it. I rushed into [eating some] sugar, and I felt so bad, just as if I was poisoned. It was tough. In life, you get to remember some tastes you had in your childhood, but you don’t get to rediscover taste quite often. And it’s just exquisite. It’s amazing. The first thing I rediscovered was a banana. I’m telling you, a simple banana is everything!”
To find his way into the character emotionally, Rahim also volunteered with an association helping those struggling with addiction. “I spent time with them, and they’ve accepted me,” explains Rahim. “I befriended users, and they’ve welcomed me in their process and their cocoon and finally, their intimacy, and I had the opportunity to videotape them and talk with them, so I took a lot of things out of them but the fact was, I didn’t want to mimic. I wanted it to be real.”
Although the story circles around Alpha’s relationship with Amin, Ducournau is keen to ensure that the third part of the triangle is not forgotten. “I wanted to show a single mum and a mum that has so much mental weight,” she says. Caring for her daughter and brother, Amin, as well as her patients, “She’s everybody’s mum. She’s a mother with a capital ‘M’, which is very hard to emancipate from. She is brave, undeniably, but I think she’s also very stubborn. She saves lives, but she refuses death, which is, at the same time, very human, but also is a big weakness.”
Raised in Paris by an Algerian gynaecologist mother and French dermatologist father, it’s no surprise that Ducournau has such a morbid Cronenberg-esque fascination with the body. Her upbringing had “an impact”, she admits. “I did not become a doctor, although I wish I had, but I was really bad at math. But they did have an influence on me. Not only as far as the imagery is concerned, but also because I really respect my parents for their humanism, and for the fact that they never lose hope, as far as a person is concerned.”
As visually memorable as Titane, with its sexual fusion of body and auto-parts, or Raw, with its freaky flesh-eating, Alpha is a technical marvel. Makeup artist Olivier Afonso and Belgian-born cinematographer Ruben Impens help create an almost hallucinogenic feel.
But after the unexpected success of Titane, it feels like Ducournau was struck by a backlash from her own French film industry. Alpha did not score one nomination at the recent Césars – the French equivalent of the Oscars.
When the film premiered in Cannes last year, the reaction was divisive, as it was for Titane. “I know that everyone is going to have apprehension towards my films,” Ducournau shrugs. “Maybe I should be used to it, although you never fully get used to that, because every time you make a new film, it’s a new film. To me, Alpha is incredibly different from Titane, and I do not convey the same kind of emotions in it, and I didn’t put the same part of me in it.”
Certainly, it was created with an urgency that Ducournau had never known before. “I wrote this film fast, very fast compared to the other two, because the others were three years,” she explains. “This one was one year-and-a half, and I wanted to shoot it fast. It’s like I wanted it out of me. I needed to express that. I think I needed to scream that in a way.”
Script in hand, she spent ten months funding, shooting and editing it. “That’s really a very short amount of time.”
While it’s destined to split people further, Ducournau remains a director unwilling – or unable – to compromise. “That’s true,” she nods. “I do have people telling me this. I don’t know how to say this, but I don’t have a choice, really. If you see me from the outside, I am very straightforward and steadfast. I’m quick to make choices. But any director is going to do that, of course. I think it’s just that if I don’t express myself fully, I wouldn’t be doing this. I would be probably do something else. And I think I would choke!”
Alpha screens at Alliance Française French Film Festival across the country from 3 March – 26 April
Main Image Julia Ducournau’s inset image source: Depositphotos
