And now for something completely different, yet oddly familiar. An audacious mix of literary adaptation, experimental essay film, political polemic and surreal comedy, director Adam Donen’s debut feature was one of the most unusual and divisive world premieres to screen at Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn. As its preposterously overblown title suggests, Alice, Through the Looking: À la recherche d’un lapin perdu is ostensibly a new take on Lewis Carroll’s much-filmed Victorian fantasy Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, updated to London around the Brexit vote of 2016. But Donen constantly veers off course with disruptive digressions, tonal shifts, madcap cameos, verbose intellectual riffs, homages, quotes and referential winks. For all its timely contemporary sheen, this is old-school auteur cinema at its most pretentious, masturbatory, hectoring and self-indulgent. But it also has its down sides.
Growing up in South Africa before leaving to study literature in London, Donen has a broad artistic hinterland spanning indie rock, avant-garde holographic theatre and contemporary classical music. He brings both modernist and post-modernist methods to Alice, Through the Looking, creating a maximalist collage of non-naturalistic, loosely linked narrative fragments. As a conventional piece of cinematic entertainment, this deeply personal project fails resoundingly. But it is a culturally rich, consistently engaging and admirably ambitious failure. It will leave you either exhilarated, nauseous or fuming with rage, possibly all at the same time. Commercial potential will be limited, but festivals and specialist art-house outlets could help build a sympathetic audience.
The thirtysomething Donen was clearly born in the wrong era, so enamoured is he with the agitprop art-house cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, especially Jean-Luc Godard. This was the peak of the fertile artistic movement that British cultural theorist Mark Fisher later dubbed “acid communism”, when radical art and radical politics became promiscuous bedfellows, fomenting a revolution that never quite arrived. Alice, Through the Looking wears its JLG homages very proudly, even replicating the full-screen intertitles seen in nouvelle vague classics like Weekend (1967) and La Chinoise (1967), right down to slavishly copying Godard’s signature Antique Olive typeface. Donen also includes admiring nods to other French leftist intellectuals of the May 1968 generation including Alain Badiou, Guy Debord and Jacques Lacan.
The film’s digressive, disjointed plot also shows a strong Godardian influence. After a lively session of energetic sex and hot Marxist theory discussion, all conducted while wearing Pussy Riot face masks, French philosophy student Alice (Saskia Axten) sets off to track down her elusive one night stand Rabbit (Elijah Rowen). Aided by a gender-blurring, accent-juggling, riddle-spouting private detective Caterpillar (Joerg Stadler), Alice journeys through a hellish vision of post-Brexit London, encountering various grotesque characters along the way, from random racist thugs to comically inept policeman to boorish bankers who haunt creepy sex clubs peopled by faceless dummies. The stridently left-wing Donen’s caricatures of the rich and powerful are roughly on a par with Mike Leigh in their nuanced, closely observed subtlety.
Donen cites Ken Russell, Derek Jarman and David Lynch as inspirations. Their stylistic imprint is certainly evident as Alice, Through the Looking shape-shifts from caustic Brexit allegory to psycho-horror movie, talk-heavy philosophy seminar to bawdy Brechtian cabaret, brightly hued farce to degraded, glitchy, monochrome fever dream. There are other cinematic echoes here too: Lindsay Anderson’s garish satirical fables, for example, or Peter Greenaway’s mischievous formal experiments. Donen also pays tribute to Monty Python in a lurid sequence featuring the veteran British comedy troupe’s regular female co-star Carol Cleveland as a psychotic Queen of Hearts, whose killing spree breaks the fourth wall and extends to the film crew. This bloodbath segues into a delirious stop-motion collage clearly based on the work of Python animator turned film director Terry Gilliam. A bizarre detour, but also a pleasing break from all the highbrow name-dropping.
Among the colourful background cast here are cameos by Slovenian philosophical prankster Slavoj Žižek and veteran British stage maverick Steven Berkoff, who pops up as a bombastic film producer trashing Donen’s high-minded pomposity. This is a nicely self-aware, post-modern touch, though it doesn’t entirely insulate Alice, Through the Looking from criticism for its hammy performances, clunky script and intellectual showboating. Impressively, screen and stage icon Vanessa Redgrave also lends her voice as the story’s sporadic, sardonic narrator. Not forgetting TS Eliot and Beethoven, who gatecrash the narrative at various points too. Why? Hell, at this point in Donen’s deranged carnival of excess, why not?
Donen himself makes several appearances, usually to deliver arid sermons about the function of art in a capitalist society and other evergreen postgraduate themes. Shock-haired and wire-thin, the director looks like a living piece of performance art himself, a walking compendium of Cahiers du Cinema circa 1968, a real-life Mad Hatter in this garish post-Brexit Wonderland. Spouting slogans like “history is a sausage” with a straight face, Donen teeters perpetually on the edge of self-parody while apparently being wholly sincere. He would probably make a terrible dinner party guest, but his febrile intellect and Godardian faith in cinema’s politically radical potential are oddly heartwarming. Alice, Through the Looking is not the revolutionary work of art it seemingly aspires to be. But is is an impassioned love letter to an era when revolutionary art seemed possible, desirable and necessary. Underneath the paving stones, the bunnies run wild.
Director, screenwriter: Adam Donen
Cast: Saskia Axten, Steven Berkoff, Carol Cleveland, Alan Ford, Vanessa Redgrave, Elijah Rowen
Producer: Daniel S. Reynolds
Cinematography: Jason Ellis
Editing: David Gesslbauer
Music: Adam Donen, Robert Harder
Production company: 12th Battalion Productions (UK)
World sales: Czar Films
Venue: Black Nights Film Festival, Tallinn (First Feature Competition)
In English
90 minutes
