Alleluia: Not For Love Or Money

I don’t run across a lot of doomed romances in the process of writing this thing. Maybe “romance” is the wrong word because most of what I’ve seen have been the stories of two people who end up entwined in something incredibly destructive to both of them. The folie a deux isn’t restricted to horror - I mean, Heavenly Creatures, Bug and Natural Born Killers aren’t technically horror movies, Dead Ringers probably is though - but for the most part, any kind of love story in horror tends to be a folie a deux. Dracula is not a love story, so miss me with that nonsense.

Alleluia, loosely based on the real case of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, could be mistaken for a folie a deux, but I’m not sure it is. It’s a study in appetite and need, and what happens when two unappeasable hungers meet each other. It ends up being more of a reversal of what you initially expect going in and kind of an interesting companion to the director’s earlier film, Calvaire.

Gloria is divorced, and lives with her daughter. A friend of hers is trying to encourage her to get back out there, which is tough when you’re a single mom and work as a morgue attendant. Nevertheless, her friend answers an ad placed by someone named Michel and Gloria agrees to meet him for dinner. Michel, at least to the outside observer - or at least to me - is, well…off-putting. He presumes to order the wine without consulting Gloria and then manipulates the entirety of their conversation, managing to make being a shoe salesman into something kind of creepy. He does some intro-level Sherlock Holmes shit, determining things about people based on their footwear. Maybe it’s a difference in cultural sensibilities, but nothing about this dude says “second date” to me. Gloria ends up taking him home and to bed with her.

And the next morning, of course, he’s up and almost out the door when she catches him. He explains that he has to come up with some money to pay one of his vendors - sales haven’t been great lately - and she offers him money. There’s some back-and-forth about how it’s a lot, he can’t possible take it, but eventually he does, and promises to be in touch soon. After a day or so, Gloria is having sobbing fits, curled up in the fetal position. So she goes out looking for Michel, and sure enough, finds him at a local nightclub carousing with any number of women. She’s been played, and she confronts him. He admits to it, admits that this is what he does - he seduces lonely women, takes their money and moves on.

And just when you expect her to kick him in the nuts and spit in his face, she asks to be with him. He can keep doing what he’s doing, she’ll even help. She just wants to be with him. And he agrees.

The obvious story here would be that Michel has not just seduced, but has in fact ensnared Gloria, making her an increasingly more willing accomplice to his increasingly more deranged crimes. It’s certainly set up that way at the very start, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that he’s more broken and damaged than he is sinister, and she, in her desperate, near-feral hunger to be loved and desired, is actually the more dangerous of the two. Michel doesn’t know any other way to relate to people, and is to some degree replaying out one of the most central relationships in his life over and over again. Ultimately, it’s not really about the money for him, it’s about the seduction and the money is just a way to sustain this lifestyle for him. If anything, he’s more pathetic than anything else.

But Gloria…whatever had been brewing inside of Gloria ever since her divorce, meeting Michel absolutely uncorked it. Her loneliness and need to be loved and desired is all-consuming, as is evident in the fits of sorrow and despair she experiences when Michel isn’t around, or when Michel is doing what she knows he does. It’s in how she talks about love as this all-consuming force. Michel compulsively seduces other women, because it’s the only thing he knows, and Gloria cannot stand to see him with other women. It’s obviously a dangerous combination and you know it isn’t going to end well. The film is divided into four acts, each named for a different woman, and with each one you see the tug of war between their competing appetites get more and more intense, more and more violent. And it isn’t a jealous, abusive man keeping a woman prisoner, as is the case more often than not in real life, it’s this man desperately trying to placate this woman that he’s afraid to cut loose.

As I said above, it’s directed by Fabrice du Welz, who is also responsible for the very good films Vinyan (another take on obsessiveness) and more relevant to this film, Calvaire. Visually, it takes place in the same France as Calvaire - it’s very muddy, rainy and gray, and the homes and villages are kind of squalid. It’s a place where the sun shines through clouds if it shines at all, full of miserable little hotels and apartments, old farmhouses that have seen a lot of wear. It’s as if in a world with so little beauty, the search for something good becomes obsessive. And it’s textually and thematically sort of a riff on some of the same ideas as Calvaire as well - the way loneliness and isolation warps our ability to make healthy, functional connections with others. and having the same actor play Michel as played Marc in Calvaire adds to this - he’s like Marc gone to seed, exploiting people’s attraction to him instead of running from it, but still ending up the witness to (and victim of) violence done in the name of desire. He is still an object of obsessive attraction, and even though Michel leans into it in a way that Marc did not, the end result is still the same. In trying to be what someone else wants him to be, it never ends well.

That said, of the films I’ve seen by du Welz, this is probably my least favorite (which still makes it better than a lot of what I watch). The translation is a little clumsy in places, which imparts a flavor to some exchanges that I’m not sure is what was intended, and though Michel’s realized well-enough in terms of why he is who he is, Gloria’s leap into the deep end feels very abrupt. We don’t know much about her beforehand, so it’s difficult to tell if her obsession is the result of extensive neglect or even abuse, or if Michel’s seductive talents are just that powerful (there is the little ritual he does ahead of each conquest, though that doesn’t seem to be something meant to be taken literally). The end result makes it feel sort of arbitrary and I think we miss out on some potential depth there, though their resulting dynamic is realized very well over the four acts of the film. It’s uncomfortable to watch in a number of places, doesn’t deal in clean platitudes, and has an ending that puts the “bleak” in “oblique,” and these are all good things in my opinion. So really, I’m nitpicking. It’s sort of a truism that love makes us crazy, and it’s equally so that the behavior of people in romantic movies would be hideously illegal in real life, but there’s no fantasy here. Just hard, sad truths about need.

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