MEVIL POUPAUD, ARIANE LABED IN FIDELIO, ALICE'S ODYSSEY

The film Fidelio: Alice's Odyssey is the debut of woman director Lucie Borleteau, and it has in Alice (Greek-born French-educated Ariane Labed of Attenberg ) a woman protagonist liberated in more ways than one. She not only does a man's job in a man's world, serving in an all-male crew as a ship's engineer. She's also a sexual free-thinker, making the rust-bucket Fidelio's name sound ironic by almost immediately being unfaithful to her macho-cool, highly sexed graphic novel artist partner Felix (the excellent Anders Danielsen Lie of Reverso and Oslo: August 31) with the captain, Gaël (Melvil Poupaud of Rohmer's Summer's Tale and many other roles). One can sense a woman's good taste in men in Borleteau's choice of these two male actors. No dobut the soulful and fluid Labed is a careful choice. Whether the director does all she could with this setup and these choices is another question.

Gaël's presence on board the ship as captain comes as a surprise to Alice, but when they go to bed they're renewing ann old affair. Gaël indicates that though married and with children now, he still carries the flame for her and always will. Here is the stuff of romance. But there is something more coolly free-thinking and maybe reckless about Alice's outlook. For some, it's hinted, life on board ship is more exciting and richer than on land. Alice adheres to the rule that "what happens at sea stays at sea," a viewpoint guaranteed to ruin any relations with a landlocked partner. Later on she kicks one man out of her bunk. But later still after a brief reunion on land with Felix and a promotion to chief engineer, Alice welcomes still another man into her bunk, slighting and wounding Gaël. Is this an odyssey, declaring her independence as a woman, or just meandering and burning her bridges? Felix too has been wounded, perhaps irreparably.

Action in the bunk seems to take center stage and worsen troubles that develop with the declining ship. There is even a corpse on board; it seems Alice's predecessor died, and his diary of loneliness and austerity, which Alice reads, represents a contrasting thread carried through the film, though perhaps a bit of a red herring; it's not always clear what Borleteau is getting at, though clearly she is striving for novelistic complexity. In cinematic terms the local color is often good: a multi-cultural Christmas on board, a wild ceremonial crossing of the Equator, and Filipino crew members' ardent Christianity and animistic ceremonies for the engine, which they call "Demonia," are all flavorful details. The specific seagoing atmosphere adds a lot, other characters on board emerge distinctly enough even as confidants for Alice, and one can be glad for the absence of the endless and numbing sort of catastrophes encountered in the recent watery adventure Black Sea. But not only does Alice's busy sex life get in the way of the proper performance of her on board duties. It tends to strain our sense that we are observing an actual picture of life on a ship, even of one not long away from being scuttled.

Fidelio, Alice’s Odyssey/Fidelio, l’odyssée d’Alice, 97 mins., debuted at Locarno 9 August 2014, where Labed won Best Actress, showing at a half-dozen other festivals. French theatrical release took place 24 December 2014, to very good reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.8). Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-UniFrance series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2015, where the film had its North American premiere.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.