Then we flash to a penguin colony on a South African beach, filmed in a windowboxed aspect ratio. One of the best images, in the final, more Brexit-critiquing act, involves a Queen Elizabeth II lookalike cold-bloodedly murdering the characters like Patrick Bateman, with fresh blood spurts intricately dotting her face. Memorable images, and bespoke comic timing, still abound – the impression forming that Donen could further thrive as his film career continues, and starts receiving constructive audience and industry feedback. Nothing is really uncovered, and the characterisation forgoes richness in favour of detached and verbose monologues, betting heavily on the humour of the PhD-thesis-level vocabulary sounding absurd as it spills from the mouths of these actors.
Digressions and gags pile upon more digressions, before, half an hour later, another Carroll staple finally appears: the hookah-smoking blue Caterpillar becoming trans psychoanalyst Catherine Pillar, and her hardboiled gumshoe alter ego Cat Pillar ( Joerg Stadler). There’s only a linear plot arc to follow, as the famous search for the White Rabbit becomes Alice’s ( Saskia Axten) obsession with a one-night stand ( Elijah Rowen) in the weeks after. Psychedelic and political, it also has the staidness of typical British cinema, and the country’s post-Brexit political climate, in its satirical crosshairs.Īlthough the movie is festooned (a Donen-esque past participle, for sure!) with polysyllabic words, and cameos from famous intellectual leftists like Slavoj Žižek and Vanessa Redgrave, the South African-raised writer-director actually simplifies Carroll’s famously ludic and riddle-strewn text. The nominal jumping-off point is Lewis Carroll’s deathless Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its sequel Through the Looking Glass, but as opposed to making to a faithful adaptation, Donen acts in a more Carrollian spirit by bending the original plot curve into outlandish shapes. Donen – whose CV includes devising holographic dramas, and a successful but brief indie-rock career in the mid-2000s – tries to impose his sensibility and fingerprints upon every element of his debut film, yet the effect is endearing, like that of a showman working painstakingly to ensure that his audience could never get bored (although they could well accuse it of pretentiousness, crammed as it is with wall-to-wall Lacanian discourse).
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