Alice et Martin

André Téchiné's powerful drama is an astonishing piece of film-making, taking an original approach to narrative structure and containing some breath-taking editing, while including another terrific, if not underrated, performance from Juliette Binoche.

A young man, Martin, flees his dysfunctional family in provincial France and heads to Paris with renewed hope. By chance, he lands a job as a model and manages to make his way. His life becomes increasingly complicated as he falls in love with Alice, his brother's friend, and his past suddenly becomes harder to suppress.

Interestingly, the film was co-written by director Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Carlos, Summer Hours), who explored similar themes of a dysfunctional family in his drama Summer Hours. André Téchiné (The Wild Reeds, I Don't Kiss, Les Voleurs, The Girl On The Train, Changing Times,) is another example of a French director who started out in criticism, having written for the illustrious Cahiers du cinema film magazine in the mid-sixties. His films are characteristically personal and emotionally charged.

Alice et Martin is, in a sense, a bold piece of film-making, using the non-linear narrative device in a confident and compelling way, as opposed to simply creating a disjointed and convoluted film. Stylistically, this recalls some of the English director Nicolas Roeg's non-linear experiments - Bad Timing being the film that used the device most audaciously.

Given that it's a character-driven film, the performances are appropriately dense and spot-on in terms of suggesting a past that we never see. Binoche (The English Patient, Three Colours: Blue) is as good as you would expect, this being perhaps one of her lesser-known performances (she had also starred in Téchiné's earlier film Rendez-vous). Mathieu Amalric (On Tour, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly) also appears in a supporting role.

The film is most memorable for its striking and unorthodox use of structure, with scenes edited so the time jumps around and we're forced to see the drama from a different perspective. Bringing this approach to an emotional and haunting love story of outsiders, Téchiné's film is wholly mature and thoughtful.

The eminent American film critic Andrew Sarris summed the film up as one "not to be missed". Cinémoi seconds that!