But there's so much else going on.
For instance, the jump cuts, perhaps better called lurch cuts. A conventional scene change goes A-beat-beat, B-beat-beat. You take a last look at A, you switch, then you orient yourself to B. Not in this movie. Intra-scene and inter-scene jump cuts have exactly the same rhythm, A/B. The mad rush seems witty, a distancing of the audience from the overwrought characters.
Then there's the constant use of pattern. The opening credits run over a composition of Arabic star-and-hanky tiles, and from then on there are endless plaids, florals, stripes, polka dots, biomorphic blobs. Binoche, who wears clothes better than anybody else in movies, looks surprising in shirts sprigged with little flowers. Pattern has returned recently, first on the fashion runways (Comme des Garçons in pink gingham!) and then in real life (New Yorkers in pink gingham!), but what does it mean? See Téchiné's Scene of the Crime (1986) for pattern in its customary role in French culture, as a signifier for irresponsible poverty. There's way too much pattern in Alice et Martin, however, for any simple explanation.
In a more literary vein, there are numerous connections to the work of François Mauriac. The brightest flower of the puritanical Catholic sect called Jansenism, Mauriac wrote austere novels of grace and judgment, and won the 1952 Nobel Prize for literature. The movie was shot in Mauriac country. Martin's family, his tyrannical father, his upright stepmother, and his three half-brothers are straight out of the pages of Mauriac. Alice may seem wack to us, but she wouldn't to Mauriac. Perhaps he's due for revival. Read the Thérèse stories (available from Penguin) before you go, and impress your friends.
We can also note that Olivier Assayas takes a writing credit on this movie. Having just seen Cold Water, I was pleased to watch how Assayas' drinking-Arab-stepfather theme blends with Téchiné's running-for-political-office theme; Assayas' taxis with Téchiné's cars; Téchiné's Spanish with Assayas' Czech. Both are interested in their characters' self-presentation strategies (Martin works for a while as a fashion model; Alice gets a riotous makeover by Martin's mother). Both use those violent jump cuts, both use Bressonian water imagery, both are fascinated by fire.
As I say, there's a lot going on. Usually I write five pages of notes for a movie. For Alice et Martin I have 12, and they feel skimpy.
But okay, maybe I should stop dodging the feminist issue.
Look. This is melodrama. Alice behaves irrationally, but she's not the only one. The melodramatic plot requires that multiple people behave in unmotivated and preposterous ways. Unless you're some kind of strait-laced Ibsenite, the psychological truth of longing replaces the literal truth of observation. Not all family histories are lucky enough to include a murder, but all families generate feelings intense enough to make us want to kill each other. Few lovers are lucky enough to engage an Alice--commanding, devoted, all-knowing--but we'd all like one (occasionally).
Alice is not the only female role in the movie. The dignified and wicked Marthe Villalonga is the wife of Martin's father, and Carmen Maura, everybody's ideal wild woman, is Martin's mother. Although it's true that their characters are seen only in relation to Martin, so is everybody else. It's a story about Martin. And I refuse to be cheated out of fun by my (rigid, doctrinaire) beliefs about the fundamental equality of men and women.
Really, although Téchiné has a standing interest in the dynamic, or at least a crabby, older woman who falls for a passive younger man, it's not as though the relationship is portrayed as flawless. Without giving away too much about the end, let me plant the suspicion in your mind that at some point Alice simply starts lying to Martin. That would explain what a number of critics have complained about: that she doesn't look the way she's supposed to. I can say no more, but check it out for yourself.
Barley Blair is the pseudonym of a little old lady for whom the personal, even after all this time, is still political.
