Alice (1981)

Posted on Jan 18, 2006 under Fantasy |

Directed by Jerzy Gruza and Jacek Bromski
Written by Joseph R. Juliano and Jacek Bromski (”based on the characters created by Lewis Carroll”)
Starring
- Sophie Barjac
- Jean-Pierre Cassel
- Susannah York
- Paul Nicholas
- Jack Wild

When Chris first showed me this movie a decade ago, I walked around in a stupor for the next twelve hours, staring at my toes and wondering, “What did I just see?” (Not referring to my toes.) Gearing up to watch it this time for review, I realized that this is one of those movies that sounds like the central gimmick of a Japanese horror flick: You have to watch it with someone new and pass it on. I have no young cult-movie proteges on whom to inflict it, so I used the next best person: My wife. Every once in a while I had to stop the movie and massage her frontal lobes. It’s just that kind of film.

It is, ostensibly, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. And it’s remarkably faithful to what the book would have been if Carroll had written in in the early ’80s and wanted it to concern organized crime. And if he had wanted it to be a musical, and had been a Pole who knew English as a second language. And had been taking many many pills.

Our main character, Alice (Sophie Barjac), is a skinny twenty-something blonde who’s just gotten separated from her philandering pilot husband, Cheshire Cat (Paul Nicholas). She works at a television factory, and spends her lunch hours sitting in a nearby park, watching the children and joggers… especially one handsome older jogger (Jean-Pierre Cassel) in a white suit, who makes a habit of being there.

Beakers? Of colored liquids? But that must mean — there’s SCIENCE going on here! (Or at least drug refinement.)

On the particular fateful day in question, she also sees a couple of hitmen ready their weapons to take down said jogger. They fire, the jogger rears back, and Alice flops to the ground in slo-mo. When she comes to, the jogger, whom we’ll know by the name of “Rabbit” from here on out, enquires as to her health, then proclaims that he’s late for, you know, a very important date.

Said date turns out to be a tour of the factory employing Alice, and at this second chance meeting, Rabbit starts pursuing his standoffish quarry. He also starts tapdancing all over the factory for no real reason (except the fact that actor Jean-Pierre Cassel is also a noted dancer). Said pursuit is observed with disapproval by Gryphon (Dominic Guard) and Turtle (Jack Wild), a couple of fellow employees who hold their own torches for Alice, but are respecting her distance during this separation.

Rabbit, though, has other matters on his plate. He owes huge sums of money to the wrong people, and is trying to finagle some bridging funds from his old flame Queenie (Susannah “Mrs. Jor-El” York), who of course is having none of it and makes “Off with his head” comments frequently — often to her flaming-gay sycophant, the Mad Hatter (Peter Straker).

The March Hare and the Mad Hatter. (And the test audience in the background.)

All of that does set the story for you as if it had been a rational, reasonable tale with an overlay of Alice in Wonderland allusions. But seriously, this movie keeps pulling surreal setpieces out of a rabbithole.

How so? Well, Rabbit tracks down the concierge of Alice’s apartment complex (Joanna Bartel) to finagle some more information about her, and the two of them end up doing a song-and-dance for minutes on end. Then Alice takes a cab to the airport to give her soon-to-be-ex the kiss-off, and sings a duet with the cabbie on the way back. Then she sings a song about being all alone (chock-full of Wonderland references as she wanders a lonely beach and a farmer’s market. Worthy of note: All of Alice’s songs are dubbed for her by Lulu, of “To Sir With Love” fame. Also worthy of note: As awkward and just-slightly-off as the spoken dialogue is, the song lyrics (credited to “Gylliana”) are worse. Listen to this profundity: “Love is the answer / Fools just won’t answer”, a refrain that is repeated more times than I can count. I would peg the level of artistry at “Hey, it rhymes.”

Still avoiding the hitmen, Rabbit approaches Alice at her apartment in the guise of a plumber, wearing a fake moustache and glasses. One plumbing mistake later, he’s got her back at his place, showing off his collection of LP records and automated bedroom doors. Is Rabbit the man to break through Alice’s shell? Sure looks that way.

I’m surprised those cans can still spray, after the filmmakers snorted all the propellant.

Cementing their status as “an item,” Rabbit takes Alice along to one of Queenie’s parties, where the startlingly insipid song “Small Talk” occupies most of the scene, complete with waiters who keep changing their glasses until they all get up to start dancing without inhibition. There are few sights which can compare with the Mad Hatter capering around in his best “making straight people nervous” fashion.

Just in case we now can’t tell that Alice is officially In Love, the next fifteen minutes are devoted to scenes that cement that fact: Running with Rabbit through a rainy park. Singing and dancing around vampishly in front of Gryphon and Turtle. Helping a florist spraypaint his white carnations. Getting her hair done. Dancing with Rabbit around the factory production floor, while dressed in a flowing white robe. Those are the things most women do when in love, right?

But alas, the happiness is shortlived. It turns out that Queenie is the one behind the hitmen (no, don’t try to make sense of that, you’ll only hurt yourself); Rabbit, in a panic, packs up to leave town, and breaks things off with Alice. She immediately goes into a deep depression and swallows a handful of pills. I don’t know what they were meant to do, but the result is a godawful hallucination (even in comparison to the hallucinatory character of the rest of the movie) in which she slides down a chute into the Disco From Hell: Masked dancers, medieval jesters, huge papier-mache heads, and some low-tech slo-mo, i.e., people start moving very slowly. She’s about to have her head chopped off by an executioner, when she’s rescued by a helicopter piloted by one of the hitmen (whose face she’s never seen, so I don’t know what he’s doing in her dream). The helicopter then explodes. All in all, one grievously bad trip.

**“Why oh why didn’t I choose the blue pill?”**

The next scene is the high point of the movie, such as it is: Alice in a straitjacket, singing the ludicrous “I’m a Psychologist” along with a roomful of institutionalized loonies. In fact, this song is so ludicrous it’s fun, as opposed to most of the other songs, which are fully as ludicrous but which pretend to be all serious and dramatic. It’s so much fun that I pried into previously-unneeded depths of my computer to present you with this, quite possibly the only MP3 of “I’m a Psychologist” ever ripped.

Go ahead, it won’t hurt. Much.

…

All good? Ready to continue? You can take a minute to collect yourself if you need it.

Okay, here’s the home stretch. Rabbit still hasn’t left town because he’s worried about Alice, even though Queenie’s been giving him extra time to leave. As he finally heads out on the open road, Turtle and Gryphon head him off on their motorcycles, because they know how much he means to Alice’s happiness. He turns back, with the hitmen right on his tail, and rushes to the park, where Alice sits on a park bench…

Ooh! Rare behind-the-scenes footage of a script meeting!

He rushes toward her… the hitman raises his rifle as before… a shot rings out… Rabbit rears back, and Alice falls to the ground…

And then Rabbit, dressed in his white jogging suit as at the beginning, is standing over her, asking if everything’s all right. When she seems none the worse for wear, he takes his leave and jogs off.

The end.

To state that this movie is surreal is almost maddeningly obvious. But beyond the intentional — the dreamlike succession of dance sequences and fantasies and drug-induced hallucinations — there’s another whole level of surrealism which comes more from awkward staging and production. The dialogue, written in English by native Poles, is just a liiiiiittle bit off, the linguistic equivalent of seeing lips out of sync with the soundtrack. The song lyrics are straight from the notebook of a junior-high diva, more concerned with hitting the correct meter (and succeeding sometimes) than with any awareness of artistry. And of course, what passed for high fashion, or even low fashion, in 1981 is a shaky tableau, caught as it is between the bell-bottom and the pegged leg, between the shag and the mullet.

It’s not a painful movie to sit through, especially if you’ve brought fresh meat to a repeat showing. But I can honestly say, as a teetotalling Mormon boy, that there’s no other movie for which I’d like as much to be drunk or stoned.