Parky At the Pictures (14/11/2025)

(Reviews of Alpha; and Paternal Leave)

ALPHA.

Before coming to prominence with Raw (2016) and the Palme d'or-winning Titane (2021), Julia Ducournau had been exploring what one might term `body horror' issues with her short, Junior (2011), and Mange (2012), a TV-movie that she co-directed with Virgile Bramly. Dealing respectively with cannibalism and self-image, Ducournau's features have been confrontationally controversial. However, the control that made its predecessors so disconcertingly compelling is less obviously in evidence in Alpha, an AIDS allegory that falls victim to its own ambitious thematic and aesthetic agendas.

The medic mother (Golshifteh Farahani) of 13 y3 year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) flies into a panic when she returns from a party with her boyfriend, Adrien (Louai El Amrousy), with a homemade `A' tattoo. As this is the late 1990s and society is enduring a pandemic that causes sufferers to cough up dust while slowly turning into marble, Mommy fears that her daughter will go the same way as her heroin-addicted brother, Amin (Tahar Rahim). She demands to know if the ink was applied with a dirty needle and arranges for Alpha to have a series of blood tests. However, there is a fortnight wait for the results and the teenager becomes increasingly uneasy about her condition after being ostracised at school.

Spooked while trying to climb down the scaffolding outside her room, Alpha cuddles Mommy, who sings her a Berber lullaby. At school, she causes her classmate to freak when she drips blood on to the overhead projector being used by her English teacher (Finnegan Oldfield) in a lesson on Edgar Allan Poe, in which one of the lads accuses the teacher of reading the poem about a dream within a dream in a gay way. Adrien accompanies Alpha to the nurse, although they detour to the washroom for a cigarette and a smooch, although she refuses his efforts to undo her jeans, as she suspects he's flirting with another girl and knows enough about sex and the virus insist he uses a condom.

Alpha gets home to find Amin in her room, but she doesn't recognise him, as eight years have passed since she used a marker pen to join the dots of the puncture wounds on his arm. Mommy reassures her and we flashback to when she saved his life when he had borrowed someone's needles to shoot up. She's too busy to accompany Alpha to the clinic, where she bumps into her teacher with his part-calcified boyfriend in the waiting room. At school, she causes a scene when her tattoo bleeds on a volleyball in the middle of a game and she is hurt when Adrien demands to know whether he's infected because they had kissed.

Joining Mommy and Amin at a family Eid dinner (with a bandage over her tattoo), Alpha struggles to understand her grandmother (who speaks no French) and tries to keep her from the bedroom, where her mother is treating her unconscious uncle. While Mommy deals with a scrum of frightened patients at the hospital, Alpha gets bullied during a swimming lesson and is left alone in a patch of red in the pool when she cuts her head on the side wall.

Mommy comes to the principal's office when she's suspended and argues that the ignorance of the school and the other parents should not lead to Alpha being punished. Nevertheless, she asks her nurse (Emma Mackey) to run more tests in case the symptoms hadn't shown up in the first bloods. All the while, Alpha copes with Amin's shivering fits and gets up to hold him in the night. But, when we see Mommy treating her brother in an advanced stage of calcification (during which part of his spine bursts), she reveals that Alpha is only five years old, which suggests that his presence eight years later is either spectral or part of Alpha's imagination, as she tries to process the enormity of what might be happening to her. The ambiguity is tantalising, but it's also convoluted and proves as enervating as the grandiose displays of emotion (usually accompanied by melodramatic music) that feel both unearned and unconvincing.

Another follows hard on, as Mommy and Amin argue over the Red Wind and old Berber superstitions when Alpha wakes in the night after dreaming that the walls of her room were closing in on her. To the tune of Nick Cave's `The Mercy Seed', Amin pulls Alpha out on to the scaffolding and they run into the night to cavort at a floodlit sports stadium and drink heavily in a crowded bar, where Alpha worries about her uncle's emaciated form and his weakening grip on life. Outside the club, they argue and Alpha goes off on her own to find Adrien. He has received negative results and Alpha kisses him when she hears that he's a virgin and they have sex. Her fingers feel a scarred `A' on his skin and she is appalled to learn that he had been inked with the same needle as her and had said nothing at school to spare himself the trauma that she was undergoing. Furious at his cowardice, she stalks off through an unfamiliar part of town.

She winds up on a bus with Amin, who asks her to wait for him while he goes off to get a fix. Alpha runs away from him, while we land in a flashback that shows Mommy raving at Amin for putting Alpha at risk while he was babysitting her. Explaining that she needs them to be an ordinary family, Mommy helps Amin shoot up and seems to administer a fatal dose, as he curls back on the bed and she sits sobbing with a neon sigh twinkling prettily through the bedroom window.

The teenage Alpha wakes in the next bed and sees brother and sister dozing together. Amin extends a hand, as he tells her that he's caught something. But, this time, there's no ladybird, as at the start of the film and we cut between young and old Alpha watching on in tears as Mommy battles to bring Amin back from the brink - when it's clear he wants to die. He looks at her, as Mommy jams a needle into his chest and he gurgles back to consciousness and the music blares on like something out of a cheap telenovela.

Mommy treats Amin in his hospital bed. He pleads with her not to wake him just before he slips away. She wakes in her bed to find the teenage Alpha telling her to let go because she did all she could for her brother. They cuddle on the bed and Alpha sings a Berber song. However, they have one last task, as they drive Amin back to where he came from and a red wind whirls around them as Mommy sees her sibling dissolve into dust and Alpha watches from a distance with a red tear line staining her cheek.

As style prevails so overwhelmingly over substance here, it's only right to commend the contributions of Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens, production designer Emmanuelle Duplay, and costumier Isabelle Pannetier. But editor Jean-Christophe Bouzy has a harder time piecing together the time slips and he's not helped much by Ducournau's scenario, which feels like it's being made up as it goes along, with each development being invested with greater lashings of significance and sincerity - when, actually, this is a simple story that explores basic themes with no particular inspiration or insight.

Rahim can't be faulted for his commitment, as he shed 20 kilograms to play the wasting Amin (with his efforts being enhanced by make-up artist Olivier Afonso's marbling effect). Golshifteh Farahani does what she can with an underwritten part that veers between the emotional highs and lows that are countrepointed by Jim Williams's over-insistent TV-movieish electric score. But newcomer

Mélissa Boros displays commendable tenacity and composure in making sense of Alpha's confusingly convoluted rite of passage, which commences with the highly unlikely act (even for a teen rebelling against a cosseting doctor mother) of being tattooed with a dirty needle at the kind of party that 13 year-olds only ever attend in films striving overly hard to shock.

Yet we never for a second believe that she is infected, although that doesn't detract from the depiction of the paranoia among her classmates. Nor does it reduce the tension between Mommy's professional outlook and the fraught emotions of an anxious mother and a grieving sister. Consequently, events jumble in on each other without Alpha registering much understanding of the potential gravity of her situation (`I'm too young') and being too much in thrall to the `dream within a dream' to become gnawingly anxious about her fate.

Several reviews have opined that Ducournau should have focussed on AIDS rather than devising her own lethal virus. One wonders whether they would offer the same advice to David Cronenberg, as critics still seem discomfited by the prospect of women directors producing sci-fi or body horror pictures. Ducournau has created a credible milieu and a terrifying disease. It's just a shame that the overwrought storytelling and sketchy characterisation aren't as ambitious or accomplished.

PATERNAL LEAVE.

Alissa Jung started out dubbing children's films in the early 1990s before becoming a familiar face on German television. She has made her directorial debut with Paternal Leave, a German-Italian co-production that has been selected as the November title by CinemaItaliaUK.

Fifteen year-old Leona Neumann (Juli Grabenhenrich) has a stormy relationship with her Berlin-based mother, Anna. So, when work forces her to break a promise, Leo hops a train to Italy to track down the father she has recently found in an online surfing video. Taking a bus to Marina Romea, a village on the Adriatic coast of the Emilia Romagna, she locates the beach shack and waits for Paolo Cubini (Luca Marinelli) to come home.

Struggling to communicate through a little English, Leo tries to interview Paolo using questions she has long been compiling in a notebook. He is uncomfortable and cooks her pasta and disbelieves her when she says she's on a cultural exchange with a local family. However, they are interrupted by a child's voice on a walkie-talkie and Leo wanders outside to see Paolo singing a lullaby to his toddler daughter, Emilia (Joy Falletti Cardillo), in a parked camper van. She dozes off on a deckchair and Paolo pulls it into the shack without waking her so he can spend the night in the van.

The next morning, Leo announces that she is going to stay to get to know him, although she gets jealous when she sees him giving Emilia a piggy back. She calls home, but can't tell her mother where she is and fibs about staying with a friend to buy her an extra night. Hitching a lift to the café in the centre from delivery boy, Edoardo (Arturo Gabbriellini), Leo ignores Paolo and Emilia as they have breakfast and she asks Edoardo lots of questions. He jokes that she's too nosy and spins her a yarn about gossips claiming that Paolo murdered his wife and child.

Wandering off with a flamingo swimming ring for Emilia, Leo accepts a life from Paolo, who gives her the chance to return his stolen wallet while searching for it in the van. He asks how much Anna had told Leo about him and reveals that they had got together on a summer job. Stopping to look at some flamingos on the Po Delta, Leo explains that the birds make excellent fathers. She shows Paolo some photos from her childhood and is wounded when he admits to having taken a paternity test after she was born. He hadn't seen her since, but denies that he simply ran away from his responsibility, as things were complicated and time had passed.

When they drive to a builders' yard to collect tiles to repair his roof, Paolo pointedly doesn't introduce Leo to his ex-brother-in-law and she is hurt than he has never told his family or friends about her. Nevertheless, she agrees to go for a surfing lesson (even though it's off-season and the sea is grey and cold) and Leo feels pleased with herself when she manages to stand upright on her board. As they dry off in the camper, she asks about the tattoos on his arm and he shows her the one on his chest that he had done the year she was born.

He promises that they can camp for the night before she catches the train home and they stand together on the beach. However, he is spooked when she rests her head on his shoulder and he makes the excuse that they have to go home because he has forgotten to give Emilia the toy tiger she needs for bedtime. Leo is unimpressed by his claim that he is trying to avoid repeating past mistakes and strides off with the flamingo ring. Sitting on the bench outside the café, she decides against telling Anna she's in Italy when sending a voicemail. But she is relieved when Edoardo finds her and walks her to the beach, where they shelter in the cab of the digger his father drives in the dunes. Disgusted by the porn mag he finds under the seat, Edoardo starts a fire and tears out pages to keep it going. Leo contributes by tossing on the notebook containing her questions for Paolo.

He is back at the shack and calls Anna's number (which Leo had chalked on a blackboard), but she doesn't pick up. After Edoardo goes home, Leo phones Paolo, but opts not to speak when he picks up and she spends the night in the cab after the flamingo ring deflates loudly in the darkness. Waking up at dawn, Leo sees the light on the sea and is pleased when Edoardo shows up. He is sporting a black eye because his father has beaten him in an effort to `protect' him from being gay. Leo tells him to be who he wants to be, but poses for a selfie for Edoardo to show his father his German girlfriend.

Drying off after a swim, Leo finds Paolo waiting for her by the digger. He is angry that she ran away and has now missed her train. But he is even more indignant when Leo insists on introducing herself to Emilia and her mother, Valeria (Gaia Rinaldi), who is very protective towards the stranger and insists on her having a croissant before taking a shower to warm up. Paolo stands outside and tells Leo that he is glad she came, but hopes she can understand that the time isn't right for grand revelations. However, she feels let down and turns up the water to drown out his voice.

When she emerges, Leo finds Emilia waiting for her, as she doesn't want her to go. She runs into the woods and Leo follows, leaving Paolo and Valeria to search for their missing daughter with growing panic. Thinking that Leo had taken Emilia to get back at him, Paolo slaps her face and she runs away, as Valeria demands a full explanation. Edoardo follows Leo to the beach and she gets cross with him when he says his dad has his cool moments. He tries to atone by improvising a song about terrible fathers, but Paolo arrives in the camper and they part with a hug and a promise to keep in touch.

Paolo suggests taking Leo to the police so that they can get her home. She tries to jump out of the moving van and he bellows at her for believing that she can just wander into his life and expect everything to go in her favour. They argue heatedly, but fall silent when they hit a flamingo in the road. Leo runs into the woods and Paolo follows her and they shout at each other in their own language until they cling together in a hug. Having buried the flamingo, Paolo offers to drive Leo home. But she takes the train and leaves her mother a message that she'll be back soon.

Whether Leo gets round to telling Anna where she's been or whether Paolo comes clean to Valeria is left unclear. One suspects they'll stay in touch, but it's not easy to see how the pair can build a relationship over such a great distance. But the fact that the audience is left pondering these matters proves that Alissa Jung has succeeded in making us care about a couple of characters whose flaws initially make them rather resistible. Credit should also go, of course, to newcomer Juli Grabenhenrich and the ever-watchable Luca Marinelli (who is Jung's off-screen partner), as each resists cheap emotionalism in retaining a naturalism that carries over into the way Jung tells and paces her story.

She's much indebted to Austrian cinematographer Carolina Steinbrecher, who not only captures the chilly austerity of the winter scenery, but who also helps shape Grabenhenrich's performance through her use of angular close-ups that compel the viewer to try and fathom what is going on in Leo's head, as she deals with her anger with her mother, her sense of betrayal (and curiosity) about her father, and her own fragile sense of self. The inclusion of Edoardo is crucial in this latter aspect, as he helps Leo realise that she's not the only one with problems and that there are worse fathers out there than Paolo.

Following Jean Renoir's maxim about everyone having their reasons, Jung avoids making Paolo either callously self-absorbed or glibly empathetic. While he responded to Anna's pregnancy with chauvinistic panic, he spent a decade feeling guilty about his actions and only embarked upon another relationship when he met Valeria. Here again, he messed up and took himself to Morocco to teach surfing (with the video that Leo found showing him claiming to be a father figure to the kids in his class) before he plucked up the courage to return and attempt to be a parent.

There are echoes of Charlotte Regan's Scrapper (2023) in the way Leo sets out to make her father confront his actions. But Jung's screenplay isn't as pugnaciously witty or relentlessly gritty. Instead, it settles into the ambience of the Adriatic coastline and the region's salt marshes, although the business with the flamingos is a bit corny.