Julia Ducournau (Paris, 1983) became the new trendy director of 2021 when she swept the critics and the Cannes jury by storm. “Titan”, Palme d’Or The most memorable and disgusting of the last decade. Now, four years later, … He once again shook the eyes of his viewers with “Alpha”, in which he plays on the effects of a global pandemic that echoes AIDS in the 1980s and Covid of the twenty-first century, and whose victims become petrified between coughs and marble dust.
“Why are we talking about viruses and diseases again after everything we’ve been through?” Ducournau, with all the brusqueness of his manner and the gentleness of his responses, smiles with that French contentment, as much as he is adorned with luxury Parisian brands: “Precisely because we did not talk enough,” he replies. “”Do you remember how quickly governments issued a decision to return to normal life?? For economic reasons, of course. We were told that we had to move on as if nothing had happened. There was no collective mourning, no time to process the trauma. This is how intergenerational trauma is generated: denying it.
The French director directly links the two crises. “During Covid, young people’s lives suddenly stopped: school stopped, first job impossible, inflation, recession. The social reaction was to embarrass them: “If you go back to your parents’ house, it’s because you’re lazy.” We all know that’s not the case, but stigma works just as it did with AIDS: Blame the victim so you don’t have to look at a system failure», The Frenchwoman talks about one of the themes of her film “Alpha”, which premiered in Spain last weekend.
In “Alpha,” Ducournau approaches the subject of HIV with a raw, direct aesthetic. Sick bodies, sweat, fluids, social disharmony. Nothing is sugarcoated. On the contrary, it sometimes recreates itself in those bodies that lose their lives. “This cruelty is not new to me,” he explains. “He’s been there since the first shorts. It does not respond to a political agenda, although in the end it is. for me The mutated body – whether due to eczema or something more serious – is a major contemporary taboo. It is socially viewed as dirt, as something to be hidden. I believe the opposite: the suffering body is the par excellence place of compassion. When we show it honestly, without masks, we allow for deep recognition. Because everyone, absolutely everyone, has suffering that we see in the mirror every morning.
This film “Alpha” now arrives in the middle of a review of European auteur cinema about AIDS and HIV. Robin Campillo did it with the famous one120 beatsAnd now, recently, Carla Simone with “Romeria”, which she coincided with at the last edition of the Cannes Film Festival. “I know Carla, and I like her voice very much, but we don’t coordinate. That so many filmmakers of the same generation are now speaking out about the same silence means there is a need to make amends. “During the height of AIDS, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were gritty films, and then they came.”PhiladelphiaIn 1993, suddenly he fell silent. Thirty years of nothing. Social stigma ensured that no one wanted to remember how to treat patients and their families: medical, moral and ethical rejection. Covid has been a catalyst. “It reminded us that communities continue to fail their patients and young people.”
Melissa Burruss, the young heroine of “Alpha.”
Ducournau speaks with unbridled passion when he refers to today’s generation, aged between 18 and 30, who make up the majority of his followers. “I admire his ease and openness. In the 90s, when I was a teenager, the homophobia and misogyny were brutal. They break it all down. They have the ability to accept nuanced narratives, non-normative bodies, and non-binary experiences. Cinemay, in its rawness, speaks to them because they reject the perfection imposed on social media and They demand the right to explore what it means to inhabit a body“There’s something wonderful about it,” says the director, who serves with a pack of cigarettes at her side and seems far removed from the deceit of some of her contemporary auteurs. “Nobody’s going to fix anything if we don’t truly regret the mistake we’ve made. Neither with AIDS thirty years ago nor with young people today.” Cinema does not solve the problem, but it can be the space in which we finally allow ourselves to look».
With Alpha, Ducournau comes to terms with many ignored and forgotten generations. It does so with the bluntness and clarity of its previous titles, although over the course of two hours of footage the message dissipates like the sand that surrounds and envelops the young protagonist at a given moment. It doesn’t matter much because in the Parisian her fans have found a radical voice that speaks from the wilderness, from the raw body to a generation poisoned by perfect poses and Instagram filters.