Fide­lio: Alice’s Journey

If the qual­i­ty of sto­ry­line and inten­si­ty of dra­ma had been any­where near the high lev­el of its lead per­for­mance by the Greek actress Ari­ane Labed, then we real­ly might have been on to some­thing with Fide­lio: Alice’s Jour­ney. This sen­si­ble, sen­su­al and slow burn­ing romance is like an Emman­u­aelle stripped of all its lurid pas­sion, leav­ing lit­tle but cold intel­lec­tu­al­is­ing about desire, sex and the nature of long-term coupling.

Labed is Alice, the sole female engi­neer on a freighter who is forced into a long-dis­tance rela­tion­ship with her Scan­di­na­vian land-lub­bing boyfriend (Anders Danielsen Lie). They email, they Skype, they pine for one anoth­er in var­i­ous sil­ly ways, but the fact of the mat­ter is that nei­ther par­ty is being tru­ly sat­is­fied with this set-up, and so Alice decides to strike up an arrange­ment with the ship’s cap­tain (Melvil Poupaud) where he reg­u­lar­ly vis­it her quar­ters for dirty talk and all the rest.

Much of the film takes place on this ugly ves­sel, and direc­tor Lucie Bor­leteau and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Simon Beau­fils, don’t come up with a way of imbu­ing this space with any real atmos­phere or char­ac­ter. It even some­times feels like they’re on a tele­vi­sion set when they’re down con­duct­ing sex­u­al­ly frank chats in the mess hall. There’s some clunky plot fore­shad­ow­ing in the ear­ly stages when we see just how dan­ger­ous work­ing in a ship’s engine room can be, with low­er-downs ordered into dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions by unfeel­ing high­er-ups. Indeed, the film opens on a death, which appears to res­onate deeply with Alice and may be the rea­son that she decides to ful­fil her insa­tiable sex­u­al appetite while the getting’s good.

It’s all very mid­dle brow, with much of the dia­logue skew­ing away from nat­u­ral­ism in order to force direct dis­cus­sions on the film’s broad themes. The remain­der of the ensem­ble, who come from a vari­ety of eth­nic back­grounds, work well togeth­er, and they cer­tain­ly help when it comes to mak­ing Alice’s deci­sion-mak­ing process a lit­tle more fraught with social and phys­i­cal peril.