Julia Ducournau: “I need to love my characters, one way or another”

In her third feature, Alpha, the Palme d’Or-winning director crafts a family drama that navigates trauma, stigma and hysteria during a global pandemic where illness manifests as a slow metamorphosis into stone. Here, she and actor Tahar Rahim reflect on her use of dual-timeline storytelling and symbolism to explore the entwined dynamics of fear and love.

On a jet-black, shining Tuesday night in the middle of November, central London’s Shaftesbury Avenue was blurred with rain and taillights as writer-director Julia Ducournau greeted an audience to watch her latest film, Alpha, along with one of its stars, Tahar Rahim of A Prophet and The Mauritanian. The film is a departure from the ultraviolence of Ducournau’s work to date, whether that’s Titane, which told the story of a serial killer (but there’s a lot more to it than that), or RAW, which is about cannibals training to be vets (ditto). Her third feature film remains infused with fear, but in different forms. These range from the rational – how, as she tells the audience, from the moment you love someone, you are immediately overcome by the fear of losing them – to the opposite: irrational fear. Fear that can “seep into the crevices of society when a brutal event happens.”

A brutal event, after all, is underway: we just don’t know what it is yet. We meet the present-day Alpha when she’s semi-conscious on a bed at a doom-laden house party, receiving a stick-n-poke tattoo, leaving her with a crude, ghoulish marking of the letter A branded on her arm. When she gets home, her loving mother (Golshifteh Farahani) responds with frustration, anger and anxiety. We learn we are in the middle of a pandemic that may spread through blood, in which sufferers gradually turn to marble. Fear of this fate leads Alpha to be ostracised at school, the A on her arm becoming a kind of branded mark like the one worn by the protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, set in 1640s Massachusetts, who is publicly shamed by having to wear a scarlet letter A (for adultery) on her clothes.

The day after the screening on Shaftesbury Avenue, I meet Ducournau and Rahim a little down the road for interviews in The Kodak Building, a stylish office block with the airy anonymity of a boutique hotel or modelling agency. It is, I hear, Ducournau’s last interview of a long day, but you wouldn’t know it: she speaks with a kind of accelerated precision, training her gaze on abstract concepts in the middle distance, then taking hairpin turns into bright, explosive laughter or aquaplaning into reserved, thoughtful reflections.

Hers is not a chronological telling of Alpha’s story, which has a dual timeline represented through subtle visual shifts. “I really tried to display a present that was actually extremely lonely for all my characters, because this is a society in which the social fabric has completely exploded and has generated a lot of fear of the other,” she explains. “In the flashbacks, I went for something that is extremely nostalgic to me. We tried to reproduce the feel of the disposable cameras that we had in the 90s.” Veering between these two timelines, the film is structured like a smashed mirror, with the non-linearity threaded through so that the viewer experiences Alpha’s trauma as she does. Trauma, after all, mixes up time, as the past can surge forth into the present in the form of intrusive memories, as well as creating a sense of fear about the future. “It’s really a Bermuda Triangle of a timeline,” as she put it in the post-credits Q&A.

Nonetheless, there is a clear narrative at work. In fact, since it is clearly inspired by elements of real pandemics such as AIDS and Covid-19, it has sometimes been interpreted as a singular allegory. This, however, obscures Ducournau’s tendency towards a more fluid, hybrid outlook. “Titane was, to me, much more of an allegory than Alpha actually is,” she says. 

All kinds of symbols and metaphors flow over and through the film, some you might notice, others you could wonder about or miss or think up for yourself without any intention on her part. For instance, the red dust which comes to dominate the present in the film’s timeline could be taken to represent ashes. But that’s not all it could mean.

Peering out over the Strand’s red taillights and theatre posters – looking elegant in a green velvet jacket with pearls on the zip and black loafers – Rahim reflects on a different resonance it might have. He makes the point that the red dusty landscape that opens the film looks like a Mars-like surface. As the camera plunges into a crater in the land, the perspective emerges out of a crater on Amin’s arm, a hole into his skin. We find ourselves in in film’s flashback timeline as the young Alpha draws a line in marker pen between these craters on Amin’s arm. As Rahim points out, there’s a cosmic aspect: the line she draws is a kind of constellation. “In astronomy, if you like it and you learn about it, you’ll see that Mars is a failed version of Earth. Because of radioactive particles that are sent by the solar wind,” he says. This has a symbolic connection to the relationship between Amin and his niece, whose names both begin with A and whose physical gestures often echo one another as the film develops. “We go from Mars to Earth, and that symbolised for me Amin and Alpha,” he says.

Rather than viewing the film as a singular allegory, then, it could be more meaningful to view it as weaving together different elements on the dual themes of fear and empathy for the stigmatised. After all, when it came to the process of creating it, Ducournau didn’t have a pre-established plan laid out or a set of symbols to tick off. “It’s not conscious,” she says. She compares herself weaving the topic of fear through to film to weaving a pattern or a motif from some fabric. “When you know that you want to talk about this [topic], then you try to build all the situations to make you understand how fear is seeping through and changing all the interactions between characters and such. It’s not conscious.”

The marble is one fabric in that woven pattern. It was chosen as a way of sanctifying those whom society too often deems invisible, granting them the dignity they deserve. As Rahim tells me, the movie was made to honour people who’ve been on the receiving end of stigma. “That’s the reason why they turn into marble,” he says. “They enter eternity this way.” 

The key focus is the reaction to the pandemic by wider society, rather than the illness itself. “The virus that is spreading out – to me – is fear,” Ducournau tells me. “And that’s [what] I dissect, right? Because it’s not about the disease per se.” 

There are some classic Ducournau moments along the way. True to form, there’s a mesmerising dancefloor scene, and when we speak, she is perhaps most alert when talking about dance and music, which are used in the film to devastating effect. There’s one particular scene in a dive bar in which Rahim’s Amin and Mélissa Boros’ Alpha lose themselves to music, the scene taking place on a knife-edge of blissful abandon and deepening terror. When I ask about this, she enthuses about the influence of contemporary choreographer Pina Bausch, who had dancers repeat the same movement many times “to the point where what was originally order – the predictability of the gesture – becomes a trance that becomes chaos.” It is, she says, “like a machine derailing,” a kind of choreography that can create order from disorder, and vice versa.

“I loved that [scene] because it was a long shot, and then she edited it,” Rahim recalls. “I felt like I was entering a liminal space; it was like being in purgatory. Space and time were bent.” Amin is not the only one dancing in the scene: it’s a busy space populated by people, many of whom are in different stages of their transformation into marble, drinking, dancing, escaping. A particularly striking shot is looking up from Alpha’s perspective as a statuesque dancer on a podium who rocks from side to side in rigid swings, banging their cane on the floor. Rahim could hear this happening as he danced. “She was like a clock,” he recalls. “I could hear the clock ticking, and it was like” – he knocks on the table to recreate the sound of the cane’s relentless thud, thud, thud – “death is coming.” Ducournau remembers it vividly, too: “The pain we see on his face. The fear that we read in his eyes. I think that’s what makes the most out of this choreography – it’s Tahar’s amazing interpretation of the fear that [Amin] feels at this moment.”

Fear pervades the film, but this is not the body horror she is known for. “I gotta say that I expected something different when I read [the script],” Rahim says. “I thought it would be a continuity of the first two movies she’s done, but when I read this one, I was like ‘that’s not a body horror movie’, ‘that’s not a genre movie’.” So what is it? “She uses the language [of genre],” he explains, “but it’s a family drama.”

It is a family drama, and one with empathy and love that equals the sense of fear, driving the development of the characters. There is suffering throughout, but nobody is reduced to that alone. “I really, really, really don’t – and refuse to – reduce Amin to his addiction,” Ducournau says. “It does not define him in any way. This is an affliction that needs to be supported. He needs the support, he needs the care and the understanding, as anyone who is affected by anything does. And I don’t want to use this as a basic definition of him.” 

Instead, Ducournau seems to say, the best work happens when you transcend any sense of judgment to a point where you just try to understand your character. “When you try to understand his pain,” she clarifies, and perhaps most of all, “when you love the character.” There’s a beautiful irony in the fact that even as his illness destines his physical body to turn to marble, Amin’s character is fluid and evolving. We feel there’s more to learn about the different sides of him, the playful goofy side, the loving side. Rahim sees him as a fallen angel who’s lost his wings, an image he found Ducournau shared, though they’d never actually discussed it. How does she achieve this sense of fluidity? “Just by loving the characters, by understanding them, their complexity, and, as I say, refusing to define them and to set them in stone. All my characters evolve constantly.”

Despite Ducournau’s first couple of films revelling in at least one genuine look-away-from-the-screen moment each, there are deep reservoirs of empathy and love in her writing, and the ways in which she draws in the viewer’s emotional focus to a needlepoint. That’s never been truer than in Alpha. “I need to love my characters, one way or another,” she reiterates. In the bleak, relentless world Alpha finds herself in, there is, nonetheless, joy to be found. “Fear and love are two sides of the same coin,” Ducournau says. It’s hard to deny the truth of that.