Critic's Chair: Guy Somerset salutes Losing Alice, a compelling eight-part psychological thriller showing on Apple TV+
Who doesn’t like a compliment, a bit of flattery? But, unless you happen to be Donald J Trump, when the flattery spills over into sycophancy you tend to get suspicious.
Alice Ginor (Ayelet Zurer) in Losing Alice is the acclaimed auteur of a bunch of heavily sexual feminist films that sound like a soft-core cross between Catherine Breillat and Erika Lust. Now enduring the frustrations and boredom of stay-at-home motherhood in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, Alice is interrupted on a train journey home by gushing young fan Sophie (Lihi Kornowski), who knows Alice’s work inside out and turns herself inside out praising her.
Alarm bells ring. For the viewer at least. Alice is abashed and uncomfortable, but also appreciates the attention now her filmmaking is in the past and her identity revolves around her three daughters and is overshadowed by famous actor husband David (Gal Toren).
Of course, the viewer has the advantage of knowing they are watching a psychological thriller. Losing Alice, for all that it explores the gaps, and lack of them, between art and life, for all its layers of stories within stories, its blurring of what is real and what is made up or fantasy, isn’t quite ready to stretch its self-awareness to busting the fourth wall altogether and have Alice alert to the warning signs of the genre in which she finds herself.
If she were, she might be more on top of the show’s many allusions to Alfred Hitchcock and of the general rule that meetings of strangers on a train don’t end well in these kinds of story. She might take more cues from the show’s eerie and decidedly Hitchcockian score.
Even with the fourth wall intact, surely she and David have made enough films to understand the principles of foreshadowing and the symbolism of being menaced by a wild boar while replacing a flat tyre on their car and noting the need to ignore it and not make any sudden movements. As for boars maybe also for batshit-crazy femme fatales.
In another scene, as David releases a trapped rat, Sophie’s older boyfriend Ami (Shai Avivi) tells him: “You know if you set it free it’ll just come back. Known fact. You gotta drown it while it’s in the trap. Just so the fucker doesn’t jump out.”
Known fact indeed.
But no, David is soon signed up to star in the film of Sophie’s own heavily sexual screenplay and when the director first disappears and then is found dead (suicide being the accepted – and most benign – explanation) Alice is persuaded to direct.
You can appreciate why she might want to get back in the game. Preferable to attending premieres of your husband’s dreadful-looking films where people either ignore you or spill their drink on you because they “didn’t see you there”.
Then, the next morning, you are expected to remain attentive while your husband reads out the pasting his performance in the film receives from a newspaper critic.
Actors! So insecure and needy.
As the filmmaking gets going, with its producer meetings and crew banter, you can imagine how Losing Alice might play out if it were the beloved French comedy Call My Agent. But creator, writer and director (another auteur!) Sigal Avin has darker turns in mind than a bunch of luvvies larking around and sending themselves up something rotten.
The tone is, yes, partly Hitchcockian – the Hitchcock of that twisted triptych Rear Window, Vertigo and Marnie. But even Hitchcock, with his fabled cameo walk-ons and perverse inclinations, didn’t cast wife Alma and then shoot her in full-on sex scenes, demanding endless retakes until she “gives it her all”. This, though, is what Alice insists of David. All while she watches closely on a monitor in the next room of the “sexy but sleazy” hotel where they are making the film.
The voyeurism, here and with the spying on Alice at night through her open venetian blinds by doctor neighbour Tamir (Yossi Marshek), is taken to levels beyond Hitchcock’s wildest dreams.
This and other aspects of the show are more like the films of Nicolas Roeg: Performance (the shifting sands of identity amid all the role-play); Don’t Look Now (the self-perpetuation of suspicion, the ‘Did they really do it?’ of the sex scene); Bad Timing (the downright weirdness).
Occasionally, it reaches such camp, operatic peaks of hysteria you can’t help but think of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.
Losing Alice certainly throws a lot into the mix. Not all of it hangs together
As much as the characters play with each other’s heads, the show plays with the viewer’s, and you may feel cheated by some of the red herrings.
But maybe I’m just being a ‘bad reader’.
At one point, Alice asks Sophie how she came up with the story in her screenplay.
“Is it true? I mean, it feels very real.”
“What? A girl who kills her friend so she can keep dating the friend’s dad?”
“Life happens.”
It does, but so does art, and while the show explores the extent one impinges on the other, it also warns against literalism, with Sophie’s boyfriend (well versed in literature as well as getting rid of rats) quoting Israeli writer Amos Oz’s novel A Tale of Love and Darkness.
“The bad reader always wants to know, and to know immediately, what really happened. What’s the story behind the story? What’s the deal? Who’s against who? Who fucked who over? What does the bad reader, the exploitative, lazy, the sociological reader, the slanderer and the voyeuristic reader want? To finally find out, without any covers or bullshit, who really did what to whom, and how much. That’s all he wants to know. And when he gets that, he shall be satisfied.
“Satisfaction means that the great Dostoevsky must’ve been suspected of having a certain tendency to rob and murder old women. William Faulkner was probably guilty of incest and Nabokov was a paedophile. And Kafka was most certainly wanted by the police. Not to mention what Sophocles did to his father and to his mother. Otherwise, how could he describe it so realistically? So real. More real than life itself.”
Losing Alice is hardly Dostoevsky etc. Or Amos Oz for that matter.
But it’s another smart series from Israel, the country that gave us the shows later remade in the US as Homeland and In Treatment.
It is beautifully shot, with immaculately chosen locations (including a house and hotel corridor Hitchcock would have died for), and is full of great performances, none more so than that of Ayelet Zurer as Alice.
I can’t think of another show that focuses its camera so often and for such lengths of time on its lead actor’s face. Or another actor whose face would reward that close attention with such nuanced expressiveness. Maybe I’m wrong and the camera isn’t concentrating unduly on Zurer. Maybe she’s just so good she pulls you into her orbit. Whatever the case, it’s a place you never tire of throughout this compelling eight-parter.
Losing Alice (Apple TV+).
