In short: Alice or The Last Escapade (1977)

Original title: Alice ou la dernière fugue (1977)

Alice Caroll (Sylvia Kristel) leaves her astonishingly unpleasant husband one night after listening to him ranting nonsense while he’s lounging in front of the TV eating grapes. It’s apparently because she can’t stand him anymore, which nobody will begrudge her.

So she drives off, at night during a rainstorm. On a lonely country road, something breaks her windshield, and she seeks shelter in a grand if somewhat decrepit manor where she is welcomed warmly enough by its the elderly inhabitant and his servant.

The next morning though, Alice finds herself alone in the house. All her attempts at leaving it – or at least its surrounding acre of land – are thwarted by strange changes in geography and the malice of inanimate objects. Things become ever stranger from then on.

Alice is a usually ignored part of Claude Chabrol’s filmography. It’s not much of a surprise, seeing how much of an outlier in Chabrol’s body of work this is. Instead of using abstracted and intelligently deformed thriller techniques to stick it to the bourgeoisie, Alice is a French arthouse version of ideas from Carnival of Souls, paired with an obvious whiff of “Alice in Wonderland” as expressed by a guy who’d like to be Jean Rollin but is neither as interesting when it comes to the fantastic nor as imaginative.

Which isn’t to say there’s nothing of interest here; at least, if you’re into artfully shot scenes of Sylvia Kristel walking through an empty mansion and it surrounding grounds, from time to time having meaningful (in that very specific French arthouse manner that’s just as clichéd as hardboiled talk if you’ve seen enough of these films, though seldom as funny) and vague conversations with enigmatic men and boys.

Chabrol lacks the obsessiveness as well as the kind of feverish creativity of his obvious models for the film. It’s a sort of energy you will mostly find in people having to work very hard to get even a tenth of their vision on screen, so very far from our director’s world, for better and worse. However, at least for parts of the film, thanks to Chabrol being a genuine and genuinely great filmmaker even outside of his comfort zone, he does manage to create a mood of the strange and the Weird. Certainly also because Kristel is really rather great at turning a sense of distracted abstraction into a very engaging screen presence even in a film that only sleazes on her for a scene or two, and because the director is very apt at using this ability.

Three Films Make A Post: Campfire Stories Can Be Deadly

Downhill (2016): Director Patricio Valladares’s film about bikers (the non-motorized kind) getting into rather big trouble in Chile is a bit of a mixed bag. In fact, it is one in more than one sense. For one, it’s an uneven film: acting, direction, the quality of the dialogue and the effects are all over the place. One minute, it’s a really neat and enthusiastic if crude little bit of indie horror, the next it’s bro horror at its most annoying, only to turn interesting again a scene later – and so on and so forth. The thing is, the good moments are really good, certainly good enough to make the film memorable. Sub-genre wise, one might get whiplash, seeing as this features the already mentioned bro horror, cabin in the woods style shenanigans, a cult, an infection angle played as outright body horror, something like Satanism, some survivalist business, and what can only be described (approvingly) as weird shit. The film never really manages to pull all these different threads together too well, but it is certainly never boring to see where it is going next.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999): Anthony Minghella’s version of the Patricia Highsmith novel turns quite a bit of what was still – though clearly identifiable – subtext in the novel’s text into text, producing a psychological thriller about repressed (homo)sexuality and class, and their intersections. It’s very well acted by everyone involved – if we ignore Jude Law’s and Gwyneth Paltrow’s dubious American accents which I just do – with Matt Damon giving one of the best performances of his career until now. Minghella’s direction is typically glossy and pretty, with a penchant for the needlessly sumptuous but here all these characteristics that drag some of his other films in the direction of the vapid yet ponderous type of film beloved by the Academy Awards are actually very much part of the meaning of a film all about the things hidden under these (too) pretty surfaces.


The Hatter’s Ghost aka Les fantômes du chapelier (1982): This sometimes darkly funny thriller by Claude Chabrol is just as interested in the things hidden under orderly surfaces, though he’s obviously not exploring them via excessive gloss and a dozen of stars. Rather, Chabrol’s film feels intimate and personal, never leaving the audience in doubt about what’s going on with its murderous and utterly mad hatter (Michel Serrault in a tour de force performance that finds the horrifying and the pitiable in the histrionic as well as the subtle, usually both in a single scene). This being Chabrol, the film does of course skewer the idea of the so-called “respectable citizen” and his ostentatious “normality”. Something or someone not being, acting, or looking normal – like the film’s poor, sad, grasping for “normality” until he dies of it, immigrant tailor Kachoudas (Charles Aznavour) and his crime of not being born in France – is of course still a major obsession of every stratum of many of the good citizens of many countries.