A Potpourri of Vestiges Review
By Amartya Acharya
How much can you afford to lose yourself for the sake of perfection in art?
That is the question which Sigal Avin tries to
answer in her 8 episode series “Losing Alice”. Headlined by Ayelet Zurer (Munich, Angels and Demons, Daredevil), Avin’s
story follows Alice Ginor (Zurer), a 47 year old female film director who
becomes with young and seemingly talented 24 year old screenwriter Sophie
Marciano, who has crafted a story which makes Alice recontextualize and
ultimately abandon moral integrity for relevance which has eluded her ever
since her last great movie years ago.
At its core, Losing Alice is about ambition, about
relevance, and how much that relevance is the currency in which the entire
entertainment industry rests on. Alice’s husband David, is an aging film actor
who now has to take riskier roles for and is in search of validation and again
relevance. Sophie is an ambitious screenwriter with a shady part who knows how
much of a goldmine of a story she has, but can’t really trust herself not to
have control over the narrative because she is afraid of losing relevance.
All of these complex emotions is wrapped in a story which is structured like a neo-noir, complete with gorgeous cinematography, pulsating and eerie background score, and editing the sequence of events in such a way that the viewer is forced to wonder how much of the film Alice herself is shooting is bleeding over with the reality of the entire situation. This bleed of reality causes Alice to have trust issues, which is compounded by Sophie’s mercurial and volatile nature, framing her as a femme fatale.
Losing
Alice has tons of ideas, is hugely ambitious in its undertaking of different
tones, and it works for the most part. The pacing does become sluggish at
moments, the miniseries in the middle feels like visually splendid with not
much happening, and at parts its focus on hallucinatory and shock moments does
feel jarring but again as a binge Losing Alice works, its kinks slowly irons
out, in large part due to the bravura performance by Zurer as Alice, and Lihi
Kornowski as Sophie. Their chemistry is what drives this broth of different
tones to a simmering conclusion.
Losing Alice is currently streaming on Apple TV +.
Rating: 8/10
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