Alice’s Gaze

Losing Alice a series by Sigan Avin.  On Apple TV.  With Ayelet Zurer, Lihi Kornowski, Gal Toren.  ****

Losing Alice is one of the stranger things I’ve ever seen on a screen.  It’s a movie about the creative process, the artistic careers of women and men, and the lengths to which people will go to create a work of art.  I probably wouldn’t be writing about this series—as much as I enjoyed it—if it weren’t for the seventh episode (out of eight), which I saw on my final night of watching.  It definitely caught my attention.

The series opens when a well-known film director, the Alice of the title (Ayelet Zurer) encounters a young woman admirer named Sophie (Lihi Kornowski) on a train.  There is something about the encounter that seems stagey, but that might be intentional, as if Sophie somehow staged it.  She has always admired the older woman, and is thrilled to meet her.  She also just happens to have written a screenplay that is looking for a producer.  What a coincidence!  Alice, as any director would, agrees to have a look.

She seems to be at a difficult point in her career, which she had put on pause to raise her children.  Her husband David (Gal Toren) is a well-known actor whose career has continued, but there’s a suggestion that he’s recently taken some schlocky roles.  The reviews of his latest movie are rather damning.  Alice wants to get back to work—she has apparently written scripts in the past, as well as directing them—but is having trouble generating a project; she seems to have writer’s block, or to have lost confidence (perhaps those two are the same thing).  But she’s looking for a project to get started on, and as if out of the blue, this one drops into her lap.

Both Alice and David consider the script extraordinary, beautifully done and unusually daring.  In fact, it has a role that is perfect for David, and might get him on track as well.  The problem is that the role is extremely sexy.  And he’d be playing opposite a much younger woman.  With his wife directing.

Then Alice decides that Sophie—the extremely good-looking and much younger woman who wrote the script—is perfect for the role.  The viewer, at least—if not the protagonists—sees the whole thing as a set-up, as if Sophie wants not just to get into Alice’s career, but into her life, and her marriage.

We don’t see the entire film as they shoot, just various scenes from it.  But one of them seems to come from a script that another young woman wrote in the same film school that Sophie attended.  That woman—whom Sophie knew well—has since disappeared, and her mother (who seems rather crazy) thinks she’s been murdered.  The script also concerns a young woman who got involved with the father of her friend, and we see Sophie hanging around an older man who apparently was the father of her film school friend.  Everything about life and art gets mixed up as the plot unfolds.

But the most intriguing thing is the relationship between Sophie and Alice.  Sophie obviously admires the older woman, and wants what she has (including her husband?).  Alice in a way wants what Sophie has, not only, perhaps her youth and beauty, but also the ability to write an extraordinary script, if she actually wrote it, and didn’t steal it from her friend.  One disquieting fact, at least for the viewer—is that Sophie is obviously a schemer.  We can’t believe Alice is falling for this.  Even David seems to have trepidations.

But the whole series comes down to the movie’s most daring scene, a sex scene between David and Alice, the filming of which occupies almost the whole of episode seven.  David, who is obviously attracted to Sophie and has been flirting with her, is nervous enough about the scene that he masturbates before it begins.  He apparently doesn’t want to be aroused.  But on the day when they’re originally scheduled to film, Alice—watching on a screen in the next room—keeps calling Cut before they get started.  There’s something about the way they’re coming on to each other, nuzzling and kissing, that doesn’t seem right.  Both of the actors are puzzled, and David is furious.  But Alice, with a gaze on the scene that never wavers, wants more.

What we seem to be seeing is an artist who will sacrifice everything, her life, her sanity, her marriage, to create a work of art and get her career back on track.  She will use a younger woman’s sexiness and vitality and be used by her.  The scene that she—as a director—creates is definitely daring, reminiscent of something like Last Tango; there was one moment which seemed to borrow from that movie.  For me the scene was too stagey really to be sexy.  But there is a suggestion at the end that the couple wasn’t pretending, but actually did it.  We wonder if that’s what Sophie intended.  We even wonder if that’s what Alice wanted, or at least was willing to risk.  She’d get the scene she wanted whatever the cost.

There are various subplots that don’t add up.  David’s mother is a frequent babysitter for the couple’s children, but doesn’t seem much older than David and Alice.  She too is rather sexy, and her relationship with David seems to verge on incest.  The older man that Sophie hangs out with is also a weirdo, and gets some airtime that doesn’t really go anywhere.  Finally this is a movie about the rivalry between an older and younger woman, their creative and sexual juices, and how they get or don’t get what they want.  It’s a hell of a battle.  I’m not sure anyone wins.