Nadine is in Paris auditioning for a modelling agency. Unimpressed with the proceedings she goes out for a smoke and meets Fausto, an Italian waiter at the restaurant where the auditions are being held. Fausto invites her to see the most expensive room in the hotel, believing its current occupant to be out of town. When the guest returns and threatens to report the intrusion, Nadine steps in to protect the waiter from losing his job on her account and is manhandled by the man. Fausto beats him to a pulp, is apprehended and ends up in prison.
For two years in La Santé he writes to Nadine, who has promised she won't forget him, but Nadine doesn't respond or visit. On his release Nadine comes to meet him. In the intervening years she has become a successful model, learned some Italian and is based in Milan. The reunion doesn't go well. It all gets a bit violent and emotional.
A bit emotional (with the violence implied) kind of sums up the tone of Alaska, directed by Claudio Cupellini, who has also worked on the Gomorrah TV series. Fausto is a hothead, but Nadine sticks by him and fights with him constantly. She has plenty of reason to be upset as Fausto, finding it hard to find steady work in Milan, takes the money she has earned modelling to invest it in a business venture with a friend, a night-club called Alaska.
There's a strange kind of symmetry to the film, and it seems like trying to adhere to this structure ends up pushing the film into ever more desperate ways to maintain its balance. Nadine's employment is taken away also in a car accident that occurs during one of their explosive fights. Nadine, like Fausto, finds rehabilitation difficult after her accident, and likewise makes some poor career choices that result in the absurd twist of her also ending up in prison. Will Fausto support her through this in the way that she failed to do?
It's all very dramatic. And it's largely a very unpleasant film, its script riddled with profanities, about two people that you can't really ever sympathise with. It's hard to even recognise what kind of attraction they could have for each other, as they never really seem to hit it off and neither of them have any great qualities that would endear them to the viewer either. You can't help feeling that they get what they deserve really, which probably wasn't the intention of the filmmaker.
