Alice review: a Paris wife finds empowerment and revenge in sex work

Josephine Mackerras’s first feature portrays a woman’s journey to empowerment through an unflinching yet compassionate lens, skilfully interweaving intimate social realism with startling bursts of comedy. Watching the opening scenes of Alice, as the titular heroine (Emilie Piponnier) juggles child-rearing and baking, shot with a joyous array of pastel tones and drenched in daylight, you might expect a romance to unfold. Meanwhile her husband François (Martin Swabey) teasingly pretends she is a wicked witch, cooking with “dragon’s poo” and “ant droppings”. The scene demonstrates the film’s core virtue: its capacity to take you through the complexities of intimate relationships, balancing humour and darkness, without passing judgement.

We meet Alice trapped in a middle-class Parisian wonderland, unaware how precarious her circumstances are, before she is abruptly awoken to discover an escape route from a life where she cannot truly be herself. Like Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) or Catherine Breillat’s films (such as A Real Young Girl, 1976, and Sleeping Beauty, 2010), Alice is interested in female self-discovery; but what motivates Alice is not sexual desire but a desire for independence. Her seemingly blissful relationship is abruptly shattered when she finds that François has abandoned her and their son, Jules, having squandered her savings on high-class escorts. With the clock ticking before the bank forecloses, Alice decides to become a high-class escort for the agency her husband used.

As her journey begins from “that good girl” to embracing her escort alter ego, Sophia, we see Alice with various clients, all sharp shoes and crisp button-down shirts, in luxurious hotel rooms. Suddenly, François returns, and she must make the fateful decision to either stay in a toxic marriage or find freedom on her own.

Piponnier’s performance is remarkable, deftly portraying the protagonist’s transition from inexperience to independence with subtlety and charm. At first a deer in the headlights, Alice becomes a rebellious force of nature: Piponnier captures her with awkward intimate movements, slight smiles of defiance and brilliant comic timing. Mackerras’s potent script brings levity to the serious subject of sex-work – often painted simplistically as merely grim and degrading – while highlighting the hypocrisy of the patriarchal world women navigate, in which a woman who sells sex is a bad mother, while her husband is free to do as he likes.

The film does not shy away from the complex politics at play; Mackerras allows the camera to linger on the voyeuristic gaze of Alice’s clients, who consistently ask ‘Sophia’ to remain silent. Rather than framing such scenes as simply exploitative, Mackerras’s direction and Piponnier’s engaging performance show that these transactions are complicated. Although Alice is still performing for men’s pleasure, she is in control and independent, while her clients seem emotionally fragile.

Mickael Delahaie’s sharp, grittily realist cinematography – painting Paris in bright colours and oppressive shadows – carefully balances tonal shifts that guide the audience through moments of comedy, drama and thriller. Alexander Levy Forrest’s perfectly pitched score mixes comfortingly familiar string sounds with a jarring, disorienting electronic buzz, mirroring Piponnier’s metamorphosis from housewife to self-determined trailblazer.

The central relationships of interest to Mackerras are the bonds between women: Alice’s relationship with a fellow sex-worker, Lisa (Chloé Boreham), but more importantly, her relationship with herself. Through the female gaze we see a discussion of the similarities between Alice’s life as a wife and her life as an escort; Lisa reminds her that in both spheres she is a performer: “You have been trained… to know what to say, how to behave, how to please everyone.” This film uses the theme of sex-work to unpick the gendered performances often central to everyday life. Alice discovers that she need not be ruled by the expectations of others, men in particular, and that she can chart a path of her choosing.

By the end of the film it is neither the old Alice nor the sultry Sophia that we see, but someone free to start anew, unburdened by her confining marriage or the objectifying male gaze. This intimate, complex portrayal of a woman’s path to self-definition highlights a theme – sex-work as a means to empower women – that is still taboo, with lightness of touch and an insurgent spirit.