Alice et Martin (1998)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL 16:9 | 01:59:40 | 7,05 Gb
Audio: French AC3 5.1/2.0 @ 448/192 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Drama, Romance
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL 16:9 | 01:59:40 | 7,05 Gb
Audio: French AC3 5.1/2.0 @ 448/192 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Drama, Romance
Director: André Téchiné
At the age of 20, Martin leaves his home town and comes to Paris, where he fortunately becomes a model by chance. He meets Alice, his brother's friend, and falls in love with her. They start a passionate relationship, although Martin remains very mysterious about his past and the reasons why he left his family. But when Alice tells him she's pregnant, he is suddenly almost driven to madness, as his past comes back to his mind. Alice will now do anything she can to help him.
IMDB
WiKipedia
For Frenchies
French screenwriter and director Andrè Tèchinè's thirteenth feature film which he co-wrote with French screenwriter Gilles Taurand and French screenwriter and director Olivier Assayas, premiered at the 43rd Valladolid International Film Festival in 1998. It tells the story about 20-year-old Martin who disappeared without notice after his father passed away. Several weeks later he shows up at his half-brother Benjamin's apartment in Paris where he meets Benjamin's partner Alice who is a violinist. Alice invites Martin to stay with them, which he does, and everything works out fine between the three, but when Martin gets a job as a model he falls in love with Alice.
This fast-paced character-driven and dialog-driven psychological drama which was shot in France and Spain and produced by Alain Sarde, is a brilliantly directed romantic thriller by post-New Wave filmmaker Andrè Tèchinè with a shifting atmosphere, a parallel narrative that increases the pace and compelling milieu depictions which are emphasized by French cinematographer Caroline Champetier's notable cinematography. This plot-twisting French-Spanish co-production has a great score by French composer Philippe Sarde which features music from amongst others Jeff Buckley (1966-1997) and commendable acting performances by French actress Juliette Binoche, French actor, screenwriter and director Mathieu Amalric and French actor Alexis Loret. An intriguing mystery and an internal study of character from the late 1990s focusing on themes like coming-of-age, family relations, guilt, love and redemption.IMDB Reviewer
With his thirteenth feature, André Téchiné conducts a masterly dissection of male hysteria. From the outset Martin, the illegitimate son of a wealthy provincial bourgeois family, is damaged goods. The short opening sequence sketching his childhood has Martin attempting to persuade his father he's ill. Victor Sauvagnac, the cold, business-like patriarch who sired Martin on a local hairdresser and then denied his existence for ten years, refuses to believe him. From here on in the film charts first the symptoms and then the causes of Martin's frail psychological state.
In fact, most of the major characters are scarred by family histories. After his father's death - shown in a lengthy flashback - Martin flees into the countryside where he hides like a hunted animal, eventually making his way to Paris where he meets his half-brother Benjamin's flatmate Alice. An initially brittle and impatient presence, she describes the curious interloper as "an extra-terrestrial hobo". Alice herself is psychologically delicate; her sister died young, leaving her to negotiate warring feelings of residual grief and filial jealousy. But her life with Benjamin, a struggling gay actor played by Mathieu Amalric as the livewire black sheep of the Sauvagnac family, has allowed them both to find an asexual equilibrium.
"We take turns at being each other's child," is Benjamin's analysis of their relationship. Nonetheless, this quasi-parental affection transmutes into barely repressed anger and bitterness when Alice and Martin become a couple and the causes of his distress emerge. Téchiné has been here before, most recently in Les Voleurs, where he explored the internal dynamics of a crime dynasty. It was the generic element of that film which felt a little forced but its family resemblance to Alice et Martin is clear. There's the same concern with an oppressive family inheritance, but here the issues of law and 'the family business' are more subtly interrelated.
Téchiné explicitly treats the film as a case study. When Alice asks Martin to tell her about his 'flight' from the family, she uses the French word fugue. The word carries a psychoanalytic connotation, describing the state in which a subject loses awareness of his identity and flees his usual environment. Indeed, the film is another French examination of a young man's growth, via crisis, to responsibility and maturity. Martin's anxieties are triggered by Alice's pregnancy, which unleashes a double-barrelled stock of guilt relating to his half-brother François' suicide and Martin's 'parricide'. Téchiné structurally underscores this by having the explanatory flashback begin the moment Martin touches Alice's growing belly.
Dense and powerful in its emotional force, Alice et Martin's melodrama is tempered by superb performances. Newcomer Alexis Loret is shifty, pale and sympathetic as Martin, while Juliette Binoche (whom Téchiné directed once before in Rendez-vous, 1985, early in her career) develops Alice with a charged finesse, undertaking her quest with the full realisation that she too has a path to adult love before her, via Martin's self-realisation. If this is literary film-making it is the best kind, from the richness of its characterisation to the acuity of its structure. Both a cold melodrama and a psyched-up Bressonian case study, Alice et Martin is a masterly opening-up of classical French intimiste themes.
Special Features:
- Interview with Juliette Binoche (08:00, in French with English subs)
- Interview with Alexis Loret (04:53, in French with English subs)
- Deleted Scenes
- Behind the Scenes Footage (21:04)
- Soundtrack Samples
- Theatrical trailer
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