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Why Julia Ducournau Was ‘Scared’ to Make Alpha
The Titane director is at Cannes with her most “exposing” work yet.
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. 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. As usual, she looked effortlessly chic, smoking on a white couch in black jeans, sky-high heels, and a Prada tank top and sunglasses.
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