Print this article E-mail this article More articles by this author

Rating: Country: Czech Republic Release Date: April 11, 2000 Distributor: First Run Features Director: · Jan Svankmajer Cast: · Kristýna Kohoutová · Camilla Power Related Sites: · IMDb: Alice (Neco z Alenky) Grade: A-

There aren't that many cinematic interpretations and riffs on Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" that I haven't seen, ranging from Disney classics to softcore pornography. However, none of these have disturbed me as much as the sounds and images of Czech filmmaker and puppeteer Jan Svankmajer's "Alice."

"Alice" (also called "Neco z Alenky") stars young Kristýna Kohoutová as the titular character (with a voiceover provided on this disc by a twelve-year-old Camilla Power). The setting is a sequence of rooms in a derelict house, where Alice has fallen asleep amidst a mess of toys, drawings, and preserved creatures.

Alice awakens when the taxidermized White Rabbit comes to life, breaking free of its glass display case and putting on a red velvet waistcoat. Rather than a rabbit hole, the grotesque thing disappears into a desk drawer full of drafting equipment. Alice follows, setting up a running sequence through the film of Alice attempting to open drawers and knobs coming off in her hands.

From start to finish, "Alice" is a surreal, discomforting film, along the lines of David Finch's "Eraserhead." The rabbit continues to suffer open wounds through which it leaks sawdust, and when Alice gets trapped in his house (within a house), he tries to saw her arm off before sending in Little Bill (a preserved lizard goaded on by a literal skeleton crew of other animals). Before it's all over, we'll meet an amazing Mad Hatter and March Hare and attend a croquet party with playing cards where the White Rabbit goes about beheading victims with his oversized scissors at the behest of the Queen of Hearts.

"Alice" has a pervasive sense of griminess to it. All dialogue is provided by Alice, even when it's another character speaking (always with an instant cutaway to a closeup of Kohoutová's mouth for the dialogue tag: "said the White Rabbit"). It perhaps goes a bit overlong with its running gags about desk drawers, and it ends with the perpetually somber Alice awakening, only to find that the White Rabbit is, indeed, gone and that his hidden drawer really did exist. Alice opens the drawer and finds a pair of scissors, which she takes out. "He's late as usual," she muses. "I think I'll cut his head off."

If there was any question that "Alice" might be too much for children to view, the additional short film, "Darkness Light Darkness" cinches it. Set in a cramped room right out of "Alice," the viewer sees two clay hands (quite realistically molded), meeting up with other body parts as they try to reassemble into a human (getting it all wrong at first). Some of the pieces are grotesquely realistic, such as a living tongue and a slithering brain, and there's a bit of adult humor when the hands and head peek out the door and shudder, all trying to hold it shut against the next body part. Finally, one of the hands goes for a glass of cold water, throws it out the door, and they then allow a flaccid clay penis to enter the room and join the body. Definitely not kid stuff.

What Svankmajer accomplishes with stop motion animation and marionettes is nothing short of astounding. Despite the hypnotically disturbing and stomach-flopping imagery and anxiety-inducing sound effects, the overall achievement is wholly extraordinary.