Alex

Alex is a liberated, apparently sturdy yet vulnerable woman in her thirties. She earns her living as a market trader and with building work – she has no trouble matching up to the men. She works on renovating an old dilapidated house, high up and lonely in the mountains of the Ardèche, in the hope that her teenage son Xavier, who was not brought up by her, will move in. The walls she is restoring are like her life, which she wants to build up bit by bit. Because it’s clear that she has just lived through some difficult years – in her own defensive words, she says to her son: ‘I was unstable.’ She is still easily upset and can become angry and aggressive. In his feature début, José Alcala manages to clarify the situation of his protagonist, impressively acted by the unknown Marie Raynal, in a couple of beautiful scenes. The film does not need many words to get under the viewer’s skin. In an unsentimental, apparently aloof and sober way, Alcala films the dry mountains, the farmers’ market early in the morning, the bare interiors, the way of surviving in the French countryside, the clumsy attempts at love and contact. Alex is, as Libération put it, a rough diamond. Pure filmic art. (DP)