Imagine if The Village (M. Night Shyamalan 2004). was meshed together with a Pam Grier Blaxploitation flick from the 1970s, and you would get Alice. It’s a first feature from writer/director Krystin Ver Linden, who is bound for bigger and better things to come.
Keke Palmer plays Alice, a slave living on a Georgian plantation run by Paul Bennett (Jonny Lee Miller), who makes a daring escape. She is very confused when she eventually finds herself on a freeway, where she is picked up by African-American Frank (Common) and is told the year is 1973. The short synopsis on both the IMDb and Sundance pages reveal these details, so it doesn’t seem like the filmmakers are trying to make it some huge shocking twist like in Antebellum. It might enhance the film if you didn’t know these details, but it seems like the film is being sold on them.
The film follows a fairly routine revenge/action plot, if you’ve seen Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012) or Coffy (Jack, Hill, 1973), you know where the film is going pretty quickly. Alice and Frank go see Coffy at the movie theatre for a bit of inspiration before she embarks on her very own journey of righteous revenge. Krystin Ver Linden said Quentin Tarantino was a mentor to her in some capacity – she had some assistant role on both Inglorious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained – and given the storyline, it’s hard to not see Tarantino’s fingerprints all over the film. It may not quite have the snappy dialogue of the Tennesseean director, but it still delivers some punches.
The film is anchored by an impressive performance from Palmer. She convincingly goes from being a submissive slave to this badass African-American avenger. It’s wilfully silly, and it’s a lot of fun.
The film’s biggest issue is its pacing. At times it feels rushed, and you wish th had about an extra 20 minutes to flesh out the story more thoroughly. The film proudly proclaims that it’s based on a true story, but if you do a little digging, it seems that’s mostly false. It’s simply using some examples of modern-day slavery during the period it’s set in to inspire what is a completely fictional story. The decision to name the protagonist Alice is an allusion to Lewis Carroll.
Alice has just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
A happily married Parisian wife, the titular character of the drama, finds her life turned upside down when she discovers that her husband has emptied all of their accounts, they’re a year behind on their mortgage, and he has squandered all of her inheritance on prostitutes. Desperate to support herself and her son, Alice (Emilie Piponnier) begins working as a high-end escort.
Alice is director Josephine Mackerras’ French language feature debut. It’s a story about empowerment that offers a thought about how one should live their lives that can resonate with all of us. An unassuming film, it mixes humour and anxious emotion with humanity and a little romanticism to good effect. Under her skilled direction it finds a way to be what it needs to be in any given moment, and effectively compromises the seriousness of drama with the lightness of comedy.
Australian born, Mackerras has lived in China and France, and has since returned to her native Australia, where she lives outside of Brisbane, Queensland. Her previous credits include shorts shot in three different languages: English – A Sign (2007), French – Diva (2007) and L’enfant perdue (2008), and Czech – Modlitba(2010).
In conversation with DMovies, Mackerras reflected on the struggle from production to post-production and beyond, the importance of passion and a fighting spirit, and her humble hopes for the film.
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Paul Risker – Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?
Josephine Mackerras – I’d been very heavily involved in the theatre since I was about nine-years-old, and that had always been my number one passion, followed by music and art. When I discovered film it was like finding my life’s mission – everything I loved just came together. Theatre is so much about the writers and the actors, and then film brings that altogether with sound and image, which is art. So once I discovered film, there was nothing else on the planet I wanted to do.
PR – How significant was the experience of short filmmaking as a means to prepare you for feature filmmaking, and how do you compare and contrast the two forms?
JM – Short films are you’re schooling and you learn a lot of your mistakes. You can’t compare the two because there’s a specific art to doing short films well, and it’s a very different craft to making a feature film. In terms of the writing, with feature films you can go deeper, whereas I feel a short film is just a different craft.
If I were to do a short film today, I would do it very differently to how I was doing them in the past, because I feel I’ve understood that they’re not the same thing. Someone can make a brilliant short film and it doesn’t necessarily translate to a feature, and vice versa. But in terms of the market place, feature films cost so much money and nobody could have prepared me for deliveries. Nobody talks about that, but you don’t want to be on your own dealing with them. First of all you have to technically understand it all and I didn’t. It costs so much money and it’s so long and detailed, and it’s so boring. You should be enjoying the festival circuit and the film finally going out to the public, but actually you can’t. You’ve got to deal with music rights, you’ve got to deal with the amity and all of this stuff, and I didn’t know what half of it was.
A feature film is the long haul, it really is, and so that’s the difference. I shot Alice guerrilla style and my inspiration for doing that was that I’d made an 18 minute short, and so I thought, ‘Well, times that by four or five and you’ve got a feature.’ This was how I was calculating it in my mind and thinking, ‘I can do this.’ I did it, but gee, if I’d known, I don’t know, I really don’t. You need help and you can’t do it alone.
PR – When I interviewed Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, he spoke of how you discover the film in the final cut. With how you approached Alice as a series of shorts, was this your experience?
JM- The film did come together in the final cut and I discovered things that weren’t in the original script to make it work. I was banging my head at the end trying to make the ending work, and I had to reshoot. There are a couple of shots that bring that ending together and those I did at the very end, and so I’d agree.
I could have given up earlier, and my editor and people were like, “Give it up already” because I had been editing for so long. I was so often accused of being an over-perfectionist, of not being able to let go. But I kept going, and I’m very glad I did because I discovered the key to the film in the final cut.
PR – Would you agree that it’s the responsibility of the filmmaker to be willing to go to war for their work, to nurture and to protect it, and to make sure it’s as good as it can possibly be?
JM – I totally agree with that and I did that all the way through this. I was exhausted because I had to fight constantly [laughs] just to get the shots I needed, and to keep on going in the editing.
I think good films come from this passion. I very often find, not with everybody but with directors, that their best films are their early films, and you think, ‘Well, why is that?’ It’s because of that passion and fighting to the end to make sure this thing is protected, and it’s whatever is in your head and you know to be true for this film, and you fight to make sure it gets there.
PR – Could we say that the creative process can become as natural as breathing for a filmmaker, who either loses the passion or their need to continue making film lacks an earlier creativity?
JM – It is interesting and maybe it doesn’t stop at filmmakers. You see that with groups too, when their best music is at the beginning, or with actors when their greatest work is in their early days, and you can see they get a bit lazy. I don’t know, but passion is definitely the key to good art; there’s no doubt about it.
PR – Do you believe there is a transformative aspect to the creative process where you change as a person, and do you think the audience should also be transformed by experiencing a film?
JM – I can only speak for myself, but that’s certainly my hope. I am more enticed by the questions rather than the answers, and I love the idea an audience is left contemplating – thinking about it the next day and contemplating what it means to them. What I love about film is how it’s able to access the unconscious mind. There’s something that’s not fully logical about it, and hopefully if it’s a good story and it’s done well, there is something where it reaches an unconscious level.
Some people are blown away by the movie, it’s a cathartic experience for them, and other people don’t like it. Every human being is completely different, but that’s why I hope to just continue making work that’s very personal to me, because I feel the more personal you can be, the more universal it is – [Konstantin]Stanislavsky said that and I think it’s very true.
How wonderful it is if it’s a transformative experience [laughs], that would be the ultimate aim. I’m not so arrogant to think that it is, but hopefully for some people will be.
Alice is on Curzon Home Cinema, The BFI Player, Amazon Prime Video and Barbican Cinema On Demand from Friday, July 24th.
The image at the top is of Josephine Mackerras (provided by EUREKA! Copyright: David Santini); the image in the middle is a still from ‘Alice’.
A happily married Parisian wife, the titular character of the drama, finds her life turned upside down when she discovers that her husband has emptied all of their accounts, they’re a year behind on their mortgage, and he has squandered all of her inheritance on prostitutes. Desperate to support herself and her son, Alice (Emilie Piponnier) begins working as a high-end escort.
When we allow someone to love us, we hand that person the power to irrevocably hurt us. Alice’s introduction portrays a seemingly picturesque life: apartment, husband, child and friends. But this is the proverbial calm before the storm, and when her perfect life is suddenly uprooted and she learns the truth, we feel her powerlessness, we feel her anger, we feel her sense of despair and hopelessness. She chose to trust her husband François (Martin Swabey) and she pays the price for it.
Director Josephine Mackerras and actress Piponnier, convey a dramatic moment with an emotional authenticity that reaches across the screen. We connect with Alice through an empathetic understanding, bonding with her through a shared vulnerability, a rooted fear of betrayal and dismissal. The actress’ skill is the delicate impression she first casts of Alice, who seems impervious to rage, but then her meekness gives way to anger, frustration and an ambivalent temper. Piponnier nurtures her character, but never loses touch of its delicate soul. The startling revelation feels genuine by the way she emotionally morphs, and throughout the drama, Mackerras and Piponnier sync Alice with the theme and idea of change – the Parisian housewife skin shed, yet whose aura remains unchanged.
The story is thematically centred around not only how one copes with adversity, but what one will do to survive. If the film successfully engages with the audience, it will provoke us to contemplate whether admiration for the strength to survive adversity supersedes social mores of acceptability? Mackerras offers us a litmus test, subtly asking, ‘How do you see Alice?’ When she first meets fellow high-end escort Lisa (Chloé Boreham), she’s told that the reason she’s chosen by the agency is, “It’s that good girl thing you have going.” As Alice sets on down this path, the question whether we see her is not framed by such extreme terms as either a moral condemnation or acquittal, but the nuanced question of whether we see her differently?
In one scene Alice says, “I don’t feel any different.” Lisa responds, “You mean now that you’re a fallen woman? If you’re in love, having sex may be the best experience of your life. If you are raped, maybe it’s the worst. But in our case, things are under our control, the exchange is fair. So why should you feel different?” Our experiences inevitably change us, but the film looks to whether we place too much emphasis on the idea of change, contemplating whether there is a core sense of self or identity that remains intact. If Alice does not feel any different from these new experiences, then should we see her as a different person? Alice challenges us to ask if our empathy is genuine, and whether we understand the complexities of identity, and do we apply that to how we engage with people outside of experiencing stories? Our response to this film may offer an insight into whether we are agents of humanity or slaves to judgement guided by naïve social mores, because as Alice says, “Prejudice is more powerful than logic.”
It often feels that we are living in an ignorant world, populated by cruelty and indifference. Mackerras’ Alice is a film aware of the black and white morality, because as the family lawyer, one of Alice’s first clients warns her, “When it comes to society’s morals and ethics, there will always be innocent victims.” It’s ironic in a world that is often missing its ethical spine that such distinctions should exist. Alice, who together with Lisa, offer a refreshingly mature and non-adversarial perspective that there are no victims, only players in a drama. Here we discover a humility, a momentary relief or escape from the hubris of our contemporary world.
At its heart, Alice is a story about empowerment, and it offers a thought about how one should live their lives that can resonate with all of us. Aside from the familiar notions of trust and love turning sour, the way in which the drama unfolds reminds us of the larger point that love is a privilege, it is not a right. Mackerras’ feature début is unassuming, mixing humour and anxious emotion with humanity and a little romanticism to good effect. Under her skilled direction it finds a way to be what it needs to be in any given moment, and effectively compromises the seriousness of drama with the lightness of comedy.
Alice is on Curzon Home Cinema, The BFI Player, Amazon Prime Video and Barbican Cinema On Demand from Friday, July 24th.
