Lucas Morales | Say Something Alice / 2016

regretting silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Morales (screenwriter and director) Say Something Alice / 2016 [19 minutes]

 

Although French director Lucas Morales has directed two gay movies since 2015, his second film, Say Something Alice is focused entirely on heterosexual interrelationships.

     A terribly shy schoolboy Loïc (Hélios Dupin) hangs out with a group of friends who tolerate his ability to communicate that nears the pathological. When he expresses an interest in a girl Alice (Juliette Simon), his male friends attempt to get him to talk to her, without success.

     As the narrator, in presumably his “lost” voice, tells us, Alice finally comes to him seeking to learn how to skateboard, a talent for which Loïc, along with sketching, displays throughout the short film from 2016.

     Even that communication is played not with spoken language but with written text, the boy hardly able to believe that Alice is serious in her desire to be taught by him. Yet the two do get together and enjoy each other’s company, she bringing him out of his shell by playing children’s games such as hide and seek, etc.

     Indeed, slowly a love between the two of them develops, allowing him to perceive that he is not the worthless outsider he has long feared himself to be. He finds himself drawing pictures of her and even spending sleepless nights thinking about her.

     On one special day they spend time together, both thoroughly enjoying themselves, as she, walking him to his own home gate, joyfully bids him goodbye for the day, both of them clearly planning good times ahead.

    But at that very moment, Alice disappears, the news media reporting that no trace of her can be found. Her friends gather to share tears and sorrow, while Loïc keeps searching for her, imagining her sitting at certain spots, encountering him in a tunnel, etc. As weeks turn into months, however, the group begins to splinter, at one point as Loïc posts a picture asking the public to notify police if the spot her, his friend insists that he knew her better, as if somehow in  her absence her presence has become a trophy for each to claim.

    Gradually, Loïc perceives that it is necessary, no matter how much you fear speaking, to communicate with those around you while they still are there to express your feelings to them. When his young sister (Apollonie Dupin) discovers a drawing her brother has made of the missing girl and queries him about it, for first time in the film he openly speaks, explaining who she was and what he felt about her.

     Based on true events, apparently, this film is moving and sincere in its emotional narrative. But since silence is so much at the heart of the central character, we are left with little to hold onto without the fresh smile and gentle ministrations of the missing Alice. We never do get to know Loïc whose most expressive action in the entire film is to immerse himself into a tub of water fully clothed, perhaps a kind of baptism that symbolizes his transformation from a child-like world of silence to the adult world made real through language. In the end, it seems rather poignant for the laconic boy to demand his lost friend to “say something.”

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).