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‘Alpha’ Review: A Potentially Infected Tattoo Sparks a Tortured AIDS Allegory in Julia Ducournau’s Rotten Follow-up to ‘Titane’
Julia Ducournau returns to Cannes with a muddled meditation on the AIDS pandemic, squandering the talents of Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim.
(The other two are “The Plague” and “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” not to mention such recent art-house films as “Fairyland,” “All of Us Strangers” and “Jimpa.”) “Alpha” is by far the most exasperating of these movies, at once bluntly obvious and maddeningly unclear, taking as its protagonist a 13-year-old girl (Mélissa Boros) who comes home from a party with a crude homemade tattoo. Ducournau puts them both through the ringer here, calling on Rahim to lose a startling amount of weight — the transformation rivals Joaquin Phoenix’s for “Joker” — and Farahani to play a sister who refuses to give up on the lost-cause loved one killing himself before her eyes. It’s painful to watch such talents pour so much into roles that are fairly common, if not clichéd by American indie standards (picture the unconditional father-son dynamic seen in “Beautiful Boy” crossed with the punishing degradation of “Requiem for a Dream”).
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