Alice Dreams Movies

A reworking of Federico Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits" (1965), with allusions to Lewis Carroll's book "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," "Alice" is also another Woody Allen film on marital infidelity. As Fellini did with his wife in the former film, Allen casts his then-lover, Mia Farrow in the eponymous role. A bored housewife, Alice seeks an affair with another man and tries to become a writer. The loose connection to Carroll's Alice here largely revolves around Dr. Yang, who hypnotizes this Alice with a spinning spiral and provides her with a series of herbs and other "natural" drugs. One of these herbs leads this book-reading book character to flirt with the horny horn-player Joe. (By the way, Farrow's sexy ASMR-triggering whispering here stands out from a performance that is otherwise like watching a female version of Allen.) Another herb makes her as invisible as the Cheshire Cat, while yet another has the aura of a mad tea party. She also flies around like "Superman" (1978) with her ex-boyfriend's ghost and talks to her muse. At one point, Alice smokes what is presumably opium at Dr. Yang's place, too, and, eventually, this Caterpillar-like acupuncturist helps her discover who she is... as well as providing her with plenty of drugs--not unlike the mushrooms and other edibles and drinks Carroll's Alice consumed to grow taller and smaller as she dealt with her own identity crisis.

This Alice's sister is named "Dorothy," and I wish I saw some allusion in this to another famous fairy tale, L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." Or that there was more style here to go along with Alice's reds and the spiral motif reflected in the school staircase. I'm not a fan of the strobe effect for one dream-like scene. Regardless, Allen does aptly turn the Wonderland theme into a cinematically reflexive one. Although Alice visits the zoo, the circus and Times Square, what fundamentally reshapes her identity is cinema--specifically, a film redoubling her idolatry of Mother Teresa and her work in Calcutta. This also plays into her relapsed Catholicism, which is otherwise mostly mocked through most of the movie. Like the real-life Farrow, her Alice is also the daughter of an actress. But, more importantly, this Alice--like her dreaming, story-telling namesake in Carroll's book--reshapes her story; she learns to rewrite her own movie.

(Included in my list Through the Looking-Glass: A Ranking of Films Reflecting Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books.)