Four years ago, Julia Ducournau won the Palme d’Or for Titane, her masterpiece about found family and car-fucking. Her followup, Alpha, premiered at Cannes this week. Like her first two films, it centers on a young woman undergoing a strange physical transformation: In Raw, it was cannibalism; in Titane, vehicular impregnation; in Alpha, its titular character (fantastic newcomer Mélissa Boros) gets a stick-and-poke tattoo at a party with a dirty needle and plunges into a world of panic and fear. It’s the 1990s, and there’s a mysterious virus spreading, one that’s clearly an allegory for AIDS, albeit with some key differences — the virus expresses itself by slowly turning those infected into stone.
Alpha, her peers, and her mother — a doctor (Golshifteh Farahani) who treats patients with the virus — are all worried that Alpha has contracted the disease. As she waits in agony for her test results, she starts getting bullied and shunned at school; at home, there’s the sudden appearance of her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim), an addict whom she hasn’t seen since childhood and who’s had the virus for a long time. The two start to bond over their shared experiences with stigmatization, and the past and the present blur.
Unlike Ducournau’s previous work, Alpha isn’t quite body horror, or even horror at all. Instead, it’s dreamlike, haunting, devastatingly beautiful. Its reception at the festival has been fascinatingly polarized. At the premiere, where I watched it and loved it, it received an 11-minute standing ovation and Ducournau and the cast were visibly sobbing. The reviews have been more mixed, with raves and pans alike. Much of the chatter at the festival has been around the way the movie handles the AIDS allegory; some found it powerful, others less so. As David Ehrlich wrote at Indiewire, “As a fellow critic mused to me after the screening: ‘I don’t know if we need a cool aesthetic stand-in for AIDS.’” At the Wrap, Chase Hutchingson wrote, “The results of the disease, which turns people into what resembles marble, are as visually striking as they are emotionally devastating.”
I caught up with Julia a few days after the premiere, on a Cannes rooftop, to talk about the experience of making Alpha and its reception here. As usual, she looked effortlessly chic, smoking on a white couch in black jeans, sky-high heels, and a Prada tank top and sunglasses.
I just noticed that constellation tattoo on your shoulder. Is that tied to the scene in the movie where Alpha draws a constellation on her uncle’s arm, connecting his needle marks?
Oh my gosh. This is from 20 years ago. Originally I thought about the connect-the-dots thing like an image in children’s coloring books. In this scene, it’s all about how Alpha, being 5 years old at this moment, sees everything as an opportunity for beauty and playfulness, as only a child can do. And the same when he hands her the ladybug, for example; when he says, “I caught something.” She conjures up the ladybug. She transforms the disease into something that is beautiful and alive. And then the poster of the ladybug is crushed, later, because to me, she doesn’t have the point of view of a child anymore — she understands what’s happening, about the disease. But I do love constellations. And Alpha is the name you give to the first star of any constellation you discover.
I loved the movie; it really hit me on an emotional, visceral level. During that long standing ovation, you and the entire cast were all crying very hard. What were you all feeling at that moment?
We were crying about … It’s because we’ve put so much of ourselves, all of us, into this film. Including the entire crew. This story has conjured up a lot of things for many people; they could all relate to it. Whatever their life traumas were, they could relate to the hardship of letting someone go, the necessity of grieving, of naming things, of acknowledging things, in order to not pass on traumas to the next generation. And there was a lot of love given to that film by me, by the actors, by the entire crew. We all know each other’s life stories by now. We’ve talked a lot about our traumas and journeys in life. We were crying because we know where the film comes from. Which is a deep place of love.
I saw so many different emotions on your face during those 11 minutes. What was going through your mind?
I don’t even know. [Laughs.] It was just a discharge of so many things. I was honestly really moved by the audience. That’s what I tried to say on the mic, when Thierry gave it to me. I’m glad we received the love we put into it. That the audience gave it back to us means that they understood us. We weren’t alone in it.
You’ve said that it’s your most “exposing” film. What does that mean to you, exactly?
It’s super-exposing. For one, it’s my most talkative film. For me, it’s really hard to use words. I’m very modest with them. I’m always afraid that if I add words to a scene where there’s a certain sensation or emotion, that the words are going to ruin it by being overexplanatory or commenting on what’s happening. I usually use words very sparsely. But with this film I couldn’t do that. Because it’s about what’s being unsaid by the family and by society — the disease, the catastrophe of the pandemic. So we couldn’t leave things unsaid. I knew I would have to have people talking.
This has implications for writing and also in the direction of actors — not serving the emotions on a plate. Trying to work from underneath a lot. And that’s exposing. Because it’s an extreme exercise of empathy and of constantly being in sync with what you think is the most human way to portray a certain thing, to portray my main character’s journey. But there were things I was not willing to show: For example, I didn’t want Alpha to see a needle in a vein. I think that in the end, it’s me who didn’t want to see that. So it was a lot of questioning myself constantly, in terms of what the movie needs, and as always, it’s being on the level of the characters.
Director Julia Ducournau at Cannes for the premiere of her new film Alpha. Photo: Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images
Do you have an example?
How I came up with the disease and its symptoms. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I didn’t want to directly name AIDS and show the symptoms of AIDS. Because if I had done this, I would have done a whole other film. A historical film that would have had to be rigorous and precise and extremely, to me, almost a documentary. I couldn’t let myself go on such an important topic in my dreamlike world. Because what I wanted to talk about was the contamination of fear, how it leaves scars in society for the next generation. How it spreads out so much that you abuse people who need health care or ignore them and ostracize and guilt them for their lifestyle, which is horrendous. That’s what I wanted to talk about, more than just the virus. I wanted to portray society.
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And so when I realized I had to create the disease, my first reaction was that I wanted to make the patients beautiful. It’s a huge responsibility, because beauty is very subjective. And considering the films I’ve done before, the expectations of the audience, I was scared that people would go there to be repulsed or get a big fright. That would be completely the opposite of what I wanted to do with this film. So I started thinking about the sacred and the recumbent images of saints that you find in cathedrals. I found this idea that I really liked because it implies that within one person you can have a cohabitation of life and death. The cohabitation of stone and flesh was the closest I could get to what it is to be afraid of dying. When I wrote the scene in the waiting room with Alpha, when she says her teacher’s partner who has the virus is “beautiful,” she means it with sincerity. And I realized, it’s her POV on the patients that counts, not mine as a director. I can come up with any iconography. The important thing is that she finds them beautiful. And from the moment that she does, then I’m pretty sure that the audience will as well.
I’m curious what you made of the reviews that took specific issue with that piece of it — an allegory of AIDS that made AIDS look more beautiful.
Jesus. That’s horrible.
I’m paraphrasing, but the idea of making the disease more aesthetic —
Well, for one, AIDS is never named in the film. I said it because I want to share why I made this film. But if I had made a movie about AIDS, it would not have been this movie. I’m terrified by what you’re saying. I’m shocked by it.
I don’t agree with those criticisms, but I wondered what you thought. Do you read reviews?
I don’t. But I’m shocked that people would think it was making AIDS look more beautiful. It’s so far-fetched and I don’t relate to that. All I can say is that the reason why I wanted them to be beautiful is to put something sacred in these deaths that were never mourned. There have never been any reparations for the way that society treated these patients, ever. And that’s why we keep on going with the impact of this. We’re only talking about it 40 years afterward, which is insane. I wanted to make them a monument to the memory of the people we lost.
I didn’t mean to shock you, I’m sorry. I relate to what you’re talking about and have personal ties to the subject. Can you tell me about how you cast Mélissa? She has these incredible eyes and face, almost like a painting.
I can see that — a Vermeer or something. She has this round face and sweet, soft traits. She looks very childlike. And delicate. I see what you mean. I didn’t want to work with a minor on this film. She was 19 when we shot. She’s an incredible actress. And she has a good sense of comedy. That’s part of what made me choose her in the first place. To me, teenage years are so funny and grotesque. I have a lot of tenderness for this age. She can really work the comedy of being quirky and awkward, but also vulnerable. She has a huge spectrum of emotion. We did a casting of young women from 18 to 20 who look younger than their age. I stopped on her because beyond the fact that she has a very good instinct, she did very good improvisations, but when I directed her, she immediately got my directions. We clicked mentally. That’s important to me; I had the same thing with Tahar and Gofshifteh as well. I had this immediate projection into her, and I think she did into me, as well.
Can you tell me more about how, for your third feature, you didn’t want to meet audience expectations of something “monstrous” or frightful? Were you actively trying not to do that?
It wasn’t necessarily an agenda. You move with yourself and the way the world is going. It’s actually a film I wasn’t meant to do now. I had this in mind for many, many years, even before Titane. I thought I was going to do it when I was way older. I felt like I needed more maturity or experience. But honestly, I was just scared.
What scared you?
I was scared to tackle the mother figure. That’s the thing I was scared of. I felt at the time — not anymore — that I was not mature enough to tackle it. It’s something to tackle the emancipation from the paternal bond, which I did with Titane and some extent with Raw. The paternal figure is someone from whom you seek validation most of the time. It can be very traumatic, because you can transfer that need for validation to society if you haven’t resolved your issues with your father. That’s a little bit of what both of those films are about. Once you’ve emancipated from that, you can be yourself or what you think you are.
With the mother figure, it’s so much harder. We’re talking about a look. We’re not talking about validation. We’re talking about tearing away, literally, from the womb. From the original fusion. This implies a lot of stuff — an idealization of the mother figure, whether negative or positive. You have to tear away from yourself at the same time, which is incredibly hard. I didn’t know how it would end with the character Alpha. I was like, Once you’ve emancipated, then who are you? How do you reinvent yourself? It’s about being a different person, reinventing yourself with a different bond, without the umbilical cord. Freud says “Kill the father,” right? That’s easy. I did that in Titane.
That’s easy!
[Laughs.] Well, she does really kill her father. But then I thought with Alpha the only way to truly emancipate and stand on her own in this tempest, and in this dying world, was to become the mother of her mother. That’s the only way, actually. To care for your mother. And to realize that your mother is just a person who has been through traumas herself, who has suffered herself, who has done whatever she had to do with the tools she had. And I think it’s an exercise in empathy and loneliness. Once you’ve emancipated from that, you realize you’re really alone in the world. But it’s an exercise of ultimate, unconditional love.
You just literally described ten years of therapy I’ve done in a few sentences.
That’s hilarious. I have a bit more than you, maybe that’s why. Well, kudos to you, too. It’s hard work.
