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How to understand the family affiliation of an adopted child? Romanian director Radu Muntean, 47, has dug into several adopted children in his own family history to explore the subject. "Alice T." is released this Wednesday, May 1 in cinemas in France and reflects the fragility of the identity of a teenager and a family today.
The foreground is his coppery hair. A scene without embellishment in a small bar: a girl in jogging bored on his chair, playing with the straw of his glass, waiting for his prince who will not come and eventually lose patience. The color of the hair immediately put all our feelings on alert, but we still do not know what story Radu Muntean is telling us.
Alice, adopted orphan, discovers she is pregnant. She is 16 years old. " He's mine, all alone, " she says stubbornly, abandoned by the father of the child. Then begins a leak in front of Alice and her adoptive mother who tries to help her without really knowing how.
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The magma of emotion and family history
Alice T. is the story of a girl and an adoptive mother. It is also the story of an abandonment, betrayal, a new beginning, an attempt to have confidence in life ... through "a student problem", a teenager both resigned and rebellious who wins all the rest with her. In this magma of emotion, the future baby seems to give direction, but its appearance at the same time disconcerts the family history of the adoptive mother.
Meanwhile, the pregnant girl continues to challenge the world: from the gynecologist through the young men around to the head of the school. Radu Muntean sets up soberly and in close-up the moment of a life where everything becomes possible: from fertilization to bleeding. This is where the initial "T." will look for a name to give and a meaning to find. And this is where Andra Guti illuminates with her body and heart the character of Alice to give him an existence so obvious, well beyond the crisis of adolescence. A well deserved female award at the last Locarno Festival.
The destiny of a teenager in the natural state
Radu Muntean's cinematographic transmission is fully at work: the scene in which he enters as a friend's father in Alice's room is a tribute to a similar scene in the masterpiece À nos amours , of Maurice Pialat. In other words, it is the technique of adoption that makes us find the fate of a teenager in the natural state.