Three days before her finals examination at film school, the actor whom Romanian filmmaker Isabela Von Tent had agreed to be filmed for a character study failed to show up. Which put the director into a frenzy. She eventually sourced another potential subject, an older artist named Dorian, in his 50s, whom the director agreed to meet at his home. What she wasn’t told in advance was that Dorian had a considerably younger wife, Alice.
“They met when she was 14 actually, but they hooked up when she was 15. The kid showed up when she was 16. And I met them when she was 18 when the kid was one year and eight months,” confirms Von Tent.
As a potential subject for the film, Dorian was talkative and expansive, excessively so. “He was a bit too much because he’s very narcissistic, and yeah, it was everything about him,” the director says, and so she turned her attention towards Alice.
“I found my courage to ask her if she wants to, I dunno, just smoke a cigarette and have a chat in front of the camera. And she said, ‘yeah, [but] I have to ask Dorian’. But in the end, she accepted and she started to open up. I think also the fact that we are almost the same age helped her a lot to be more comfortable with me.”
Thereafter, Von Tent followed Alice ‘on and off,’ as the film’s title suggests, for 10 years. She leaves Dorian, comes back to him, funds his life and that of their son Aristo by performing “pornification” as a “sleazy camgirl” (as she puts it), develops a drug dependency and leaves again, never making it as an artist but always loving the boy Aristo, even though she is unable to commit fully to a life with him.
The film tells us that Alice came from a broken home. Her parents were separated, and her mother was a war reporter who didn’t spend much time at home. She was therefore brought up by a very strict grandmother, but one who allowed for little to no contact between Alice and her parents. In the film, Alice admits that she would rather see Aristo grow up with a single dad than with a single mum, such has been the experience of her fractured life thus far.
And all the time director Von Tent recognised parallel elements from her own difficult childhood, which acted a guide of sorts as she shot her film.
“I followed a lot my instinct, because it’s my first feature, so I didn’t have a recipe to follow. The film school didn’t teach me how to do it,” Von Tent says of her approach. “It was [my purpose] to observe because I had this curiosity. Because even though on a personal level we have almost the same childhood, and that connected us, I realized after a long time the childhood trauma, and the transgenerational thing that hit me later…But my instinct told me, just follow her, keep following her. And [I] got personally involved and I started a friendship with her. And we somehow were on the same path in many levels, [which] brought me here…It was very, very, very personal. I dunno how to explain exactly. It came deep inside my soul in the beginning.”
“Through Alice’s story I started to realise a lot of my personal issues,” she adds. “During her growth and development, I developed myself as I was observing her.”
As ever, kids are the collateral damage within a household torn apart by parental strife and discord, and Aristo is no different, no matter how many times he offers his game support, or agrees with stuff his parents tell him with monosyllabic answers.
In one long heart-breaking sequence we watch as he listens to another row, his face registering concern throughout. “I was more afraid than him,” says Von Tent. “He was used to this kind of treatment. If you remember, I told him, ‘yeah, it’s okay.’ That was just my protective system saying that. But he was very mature and he said to me, ‘no, it’s not okay.’ I mean, that hit me very hard because until then I was really prepared just to shut the camera. In the first place I was like, okay, that is too much [to show] and maybe it’s not okay to be in the film. But when I saw his way of answering, because I saw for the first time Aristo being grown up, I said, ‘okay, I have to show that because if I will not show that then the story will not be complete.’ This is the reality that happens with the kids from these kinds of family.”
Produced by Irina Malcea-Cândea of Luna Film, Alice On & Off world premieres May 29 at Krakow Film Festival. One assumes that it will have a healthy festival life, but what does Von Tent hope to achieve with her film beyond the fest circuit.
“For sure, it has also an educational part,” she responds. “I would really, really, really like it to be seen in these communities where we are talking about transgenerational trauma, about underage mothers, about kids growing up within conflictual families. Yes, for sure, Irina and I are thinking [beyond] the festival circuit to start…[via] showcases where we would like to meet with people and to share ideas after seeing this movie, because I think it is a movie that can [pose] a lot of questions about you, about your past, about how do you see life from this perspective.”
“I’m aiming for raising questions instead of catching prizes,” Von Tent signals her intentions for her film.
