In short: Alice or The Last Escapade (1977)

Original title: Alice ou la dernière fugue (1977)

Alice Caroll (Sylvia Kristel) leaves her astonishingly unpleasant husband one night after listening to him ranting nonsense while he’s lounging in front of the TV eating grapes. It’s apparently because she can’t stand him anymore, which nobody will begrudge her.

So she drives off, at night during a rainstorm. On a lonely country road, something breaks her windshield, and she seeks shelter in a grand if somewhat decrepit manor where she is welcomed warmly enough by its the elderly inhabitant and his servant.

The next morning though, Alice finds herself alone in the house. All her attempts at leaving it – or at least its surrounding acre of land – are thwarted by strange changes in geography and the malice of inanimate objects. Things become ever stranger from then on.

Alice is a usually ignored part of Claude Chabrol’s filmography. It’s not much of a surprise, seeing how much of an outlier in Chabrol’s body of work this is. Instead of using abstracted and intelligently deformed thriller techniques to stick it to the bourgeoisie, Alice is a French arthouse version of ideas from Carnival of Souls, paired with an obvious whiff of “Alice in Wonderland” as expressed by a guy who’d like to be Jean Rollin but is neither as interesting when it comes to the fantastic nor as imaginative.

Which isn’t to say there’s nothing of interest here; at least, if you’re into artfully shot scenes of Sylvia Kristel walking through an empty mansion and it surrounding grounds, from time to time having meaningful (in that very specific French arthouse manner that’s just as clichéd as hardboiled talk if you’ve seen enough of these films, though seldom as funny) and vague conversations with enigmatic men and boys.

Chabrol lacks the obsessiveness as well as the kind of feverish creativity of his obvious models for the film. It’s a sort of energy you will mostly find in people having to work very hard to get even a tenth of their vision on screen, so very far from our director’s world, for better and worse. However, at least for parts of the film, thanks to Chabrol being a genuine and genuinely great filmmaker even outside of his comfort zone, he does manage to create a mood of the strange and the Weird. Certainly also because Kristel is really rather great at turning a sense of distracted abstraction into a very engaging screen presence even in a film that only sleazes on her for a scene or two, and because the director is very apt at using this ability.