Filipe Manuel Neto
Dec 3, 2023
4/10
A film with qualities, but it is almost unbearable to watch due to a slow pace that tires the public.
There are a lot of films about missing people, and even though the theme is not so common in Portuguese cinema, it is necessary to consider that the Portuguese will be able to effortlessly name two or three foreign films on the subject. How to do it differently? It's difficult: either you invent something very “outside the box”, or you make a film about a real and concrete case, with a minimum of rigor and respect for the events. Marco Martins went a third way: his film takes inspiration from real cases that are somewhat popular in the media, but it does not report any true situation and tries to appear original. First of all, we must congratulate those involved. I'm somewhat hard on Portuguese cinema, but I'm fully aware that, in our country, making cinema is almost an act of intellectual rebellion. And with “Alice”, Marco Martins made a good entry into the seventh art and won great praise at some international film festivals.
The strength and value of this film were solidly based on four qualities that are fair to praise: a good script premise, excellent cinematography, a good main actor and a quality original soundtrack. These are solid values and must be mentioned in any review or critical text about the film, but frankly, it seems not enough to qualify it as a good film. The Portuguese are good artists, they have a less detailed and poetic spirit, but they are terrible storytellers and this perhaps has a certain responsibility in the way in which, in cinema, there is a predominance of technical art and photography over the story told. It's something I will never accept because I see cinema in a diametrically opposite way, as a way of telling a good story.
Nuno Lopes courageously assures the main character. The actor is famous among the Portuguese thanks to an enviable career on television, but he also had a good career in theater and cinema, and is an excellent professional. He perfectly embodies the anguish of a father who desperately searches for his daughter, and who clings to his last hopes. Unfortunately, he is alone in the film: Beatriz Batarda has almost no material and time to show us his worth, and the rest of the cast has characters so weak and uninteresting that they don't even deserve to appear in the film.
The plot is based on excellent premises: Alice's disappearance and her father's search for any clue that leads to her whereabouts. Unfortunately, Marco Martins is good at directing, but not at writing a script, and he forgot that a good idea is not enough: you need to develop it, and this idea needs an effective, convincing development and a happy conclusion. . The film is full of loose ends and problems. For example, where are the Police? And no one informed that father that taking video images without permission in a public place is a crime? Why doesn't the film explore more of the relationship between the father and the girl's mother? And why redo, every day, the routine of the day she disappeared if it is already predicted that this will not help in finding her?
Technically, the film relies on a hazy photograph that expresses the psychological interior of that father. Lisbon's urban landscape could not seem more hostile, more devoid of life and color (and Lisbon is an airy and bright city). I really liked that, and also the piano melody by Bernardo Sassetti, which makes everything even more sad and melancholic. However, it is exhausting to endure the almost pedestrian pace that the film takes on and which, combined with the cinematography and the piano, turns this film into a wake or an attempt to cure insomnia.