La Vie Aquatique

Actress and writer Lucie Borleteau (House of Tolerance) makes her directorial feature debut with this frank and functional French drama exploring fidelity and polyamory.

Alice’s journey comes courtesy of her merchant navy job aboard a freighter, upon which she sails the seven seas and ‘screws on five continents,’ while deflecting her workmates’ casual, and not so casual, sexism. But Alice must also navigate the treacherous waters of balancing a committed relationship with her boyfriend and the no-strings sex she enjoys as ships pass in the night.

The metaphor at the core of this film is an interesting one – with Alice’s one true love as her anchor – and the mechanical, efficient sex scenes are skilfully mirrored in shots of the ship’s gears and engines. That said, Fidelio, Alice’s Journey lacks the visceral emotion of Blue is the Warmest Colour and visual poetry of Rust and Bone, leaving the film unsatisfactorily, if appropriately, distant and hollow.

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Thirty-year-old Alice’s occupation is rather unusual for a woman : she works as an engineer on a freighter. She loves her job and does it competently but even in a greasy blue overall a woman will be a woman, with her heart, her desires and her seduction… In such conditions can an all-male crew really remain totally insensitive to her charms? A situation all the more complicated as not only does Alice leave her fiancé Felix behind but she also discovers on board the Fidélio that the captain is Gaël, her first love…

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