Alice | SXSW 2019 Film Review

Imagine if everything you had was taken by someone you thought you could trust, left you feeling betrayed and nearly without a home to live in, and appeared to have zero concern for the stability and sanity of your shared child. This damning feeling is what director Josephine Mackerras emanates in her two-time SXSW 2019 Award Winning film, Alice.

After Alice (Emilie Pipponier) finds her husband Francois (Martin Swabey) has been spending her inheritance on a high-end escort service, leaving her penniless, she resolves to pursuing a job in the same escort industry to keep her and her child afloat. This intriguing look at survival no matter the cost is one that will definitively be questioned and triggering even for some.

Before anything, serious credit needs to be given to Emilie Pipponier for an utterly gut wrenching, yet heart warming, performance. She so carefully transforms from a wife and mother, to the ever-confident and cunningly sly woman Alice ultimately becomes. Everything about this film works so strongly because of Pipponier. She’s resilient in all of the right moments, emotional and vulnerable where it requires, and without a doubt carries Alice to the finish line.

Pipponier is not without an entertaining sidekick, though. Chloé Boreham, who plays Lisa – an escort that helps Alice find her way and becomes her best bud – and seems to mesmerize me every time her presence takes the screen. Boreham knows how to use her facial expressions to her benefit and how to subtly seduce her audience the same way her character does with Alice.

As far as the story goes, what shocked, and honestly bothered, me the most is that Alice seems perfectly comfortable leaving her child with her extremely feeble and wrecked husband so she can go out and make money. I get it, I suppose, trying to keep above drowning, but it also doesn’t appear to be about keeping her kid safe anymore. Her motives seem to shift halfway through the film and appear more selfish. Alice spends more time with Lisa than she does with her son – at least what we’re shown on screen.

I don’t think that it was intentional for her to come across this way, so it feels duplicitous we have this story about a woman trying to overcome the really awful circumstances in her life “for the child’s benefit” seemingly, but then also doesn’t give a damn where she’s leaving him and when.

Regardless of motives, Alice inevitably comes across as a powerful force not to be messed with, after finding a passion (and success) in a more unconventional and taboo career. Interesting narrative choices are made, and ones that will keep audiences talking, making Alice a rare film on the message of powerful women.