‘Losing Alice‘ (the Hebrew title is ‘L’abed et Alice‘) is a very ambitious Israeli television production, an eight-episode mini-series that bears no resemblance to anything ever produced for the ‘small screens’ in Israel. Apple TV bought this series, together with ‘Tehran‘ about which I wrote a few weeks ago, for international broadcasting, and I am very curious how it will be received by the audiences from other countries. If I were to look for a term of reference or comparison, the most obvious example I could find is the first season of David Lynch‘s ‘Twin Peaks‘, which combines a police investigation with the social and psychological analysis of a community from the northwestern United States, and found itself shrouded in an atmosphere of decadent and unsettling mystery and magic, in which the differences between reality and imagination, between memories and dreams, were quickly erased. Same in ‘Losing Alice‘ where we are dealing with a suicide, but one which is part of a movie script. The police investigation is replaced here by the games between reality and imagination, between the film production and the events that take place in the film, influencing each other. A famous saying tells that the film sometimes ‘beats reality’. In the series created and directed by Sigal Avin, the film invades reality.
We are dealing with a ‘triangle’ but not exactly a classic one. Two of the main characters, Alice (Ayelet Zurer) and David (Gal Toren) are the ideal couple in the Israeli art industry. She is an acclaimed film director (although she hasn’t directed anything new for a long time) and a film teacher, he is a successful actor. When the script written by the much younger Sophie (Lihi Kornowski) arrives on the disks of their computers, they both immediately notice the potential but also the dangers. The script proposes a violent and erotic story, ending with a suicide. The screenwriter is quick to appear in the well-settled life of the couple who live with their three daughters in a villa in a picturesque location, with nice and friendly neighbors. Strange events are starting to happen around the team that is being formed to make the film. The director who was originally supposed to make the film disappears, and Alice will take his place, using Sophie’s screenplay as a ramp for re-launching her career. Sophie seems to be maneuvering to take control of the film, and maybe more than that. She becomes the lead actress and the partner of David on screen. Did the relationship in the scenario between the mature man and the much younger woman materialize in reality? Does the script really belong to Sophie or to another film student, who had also mysteriously disappeared? Her ambitions don’t seem to stop with the movie. Sophie takes control of the lives of the director and the main actor who is her husband, she attracts them more and more in her dangerous world, the world of another generation, a reality distorted with other kinds of passions and fantasies. I stop from telling more in order to leave the pleasure of discovering the many mysteries of this story to future spectators.
The series permanently combines three action plans. Outside there is the Israeli reality, described with precision and attention to detail – the spacious house of David and Alice and the smaller apartments of the other characters, trains and roads, meeting and production rooms. ‘Losing Alice‘ is also the story of a film, from screenwriting to directing at Cannes, and the ‘film in film’ technique is skillfully used to create the second plan of the story, with the film sets, the hotel chosen as the location for the key scenes , and the movie itself, the creation for which Alice risks her mental balance and her personal life. Finally, the third plan is the imaginary with dreams, fantasies, and nightmares combining violence with erotica. Their core is in the script of the film written by Sophie, but they risk spilling over into the other realities – the one in the movie, and the one outside, that is, in the lives of the heroes.
‘Losing Alice‘ has eight episodes. The best in my opinion were the first two and the final episode. The dramatic structure created in the first two episodes supports the rest of the series, but not everything that happens between episodes 3 and 6 seemed interesting to me, there are rehearsals, I think the series could be shorter by about two episodes, and I think from here it could have been cut. Episode 7 (the penultimate) has a special status, a key scene takes place in it, it has an almost independent structure and different from the rest of the series. But the episode didn’t seem very successful to me, and I think it’s another proof that Israeli directors rarely manage to put on the screen the passion that gives quality to good erotic scenes. Ayelet Zurer plays the role of Alice excellently, with a fragile double balance between reason and passion, between artistic sacrifice and the risks it involves in the lives of art creators. The script often makes her repeat the same feelings, but the problem is not the actress. The young actress Lihi Kornowski creates a mysterious and dangerous role, she is the one who dominates the story, leaving us to constantly wonder if we are dealing with an ambitious young woman, maybe also a victim of the passions of others, or with an incarnation of the devil. Gal Toren completes the triangle, his interpretation is correct, but he seems to be missing something of the charismatic aura that his character implies. The image contributes to the construction of the atmosphere, with a color palette borrowed from good thriller or horror movies. With ‘Losing Alice’, the director and screenwriter aimed very high, wanting to create a tension series that starts from the Israeli reality but reaches different territories from those approached in local films and series so far. I think he succeeded for the most part, but not totally. Let’s see what spectators from other parts of the world will say.