O Estranho Mundo de Alice

I agree with the previous comment, this movie is so weird and pretty painful to watch but I have been showing it to as many people as possible. Perhaps to share in the misery and craziness? I first rented this movie way back in 1999, thinking I was getting the Alice with Mia Farrow on the cover. This movie was what I got instead. I was forever changed. I also think there should be a support group for people who have seen this movie! It's a live-action movie based on the Alice in Wonderland story and it's also a musical. It seems like for some reason, even though the main character seems to be speaking English, she is overdubbed.

You know how sometimes you'll watch a movie and there will be a scene or two that just seems way too long? Should have been edited? That's what happens with this movie, but for EVERY scene.

Definitely the oddest version of Lewis Carroll's classic novel ever conceived. A Belgian-Polish collaboration, AlICJA humanizes the familiar characters, although it's often difficult if not impossible to see the connections (other than for those actors whose characters are named for the Carroll originals. The plot wanders aimlessly, with often no connection between scenes or explanation of what is going on at times. The direction is haphazard at best, the dance numbers (and there are plenty of them) filmed awkwardly (although performed apparently by members of the Warsaw Ballet), and the songs laughingly bad. Lots of wasted talent - one only hopes that Cassell (the best thing about this film is his dancing), York, and Paul Nicholas were able to take the money and run. And then there's Jack Wild....

I've had a used video of this movie sitting on my shelves for some time. Where I bought it, I'm no longer sure: perhaps a local video store chain, or a pawn shop, perhaps as part of deal. The version I saw was entirely dubbed in English; I'm not sure if a Polish version with Polish songs exists.

This certainly is a strange movie. Sophie Barjac, playing Alice, is quite lovely and appealing, and without her it might have been more difficult to get through.

The movie starts in a park, where Alice is friendly with a young girl of less than ten, I'd guess, who is pointing out her various boyfriends, and asking Alice if she has a boyfriend. Alice doesn't (she's a divorcée), but she finds herself attracted to an older man jogging through the park, who the girl thinks looks like a rabbit. Alice spots a sniper just outside the park, and she faints after the jogger goes down. She is awakened by the jogger and the girl, however. Was she daydreaming, or hallucinating, or having a premonition? It was never really clear to me, and the end of the movie just increased my confusion (and this was just the beginning of the movie!).

Alice works at a factory with Mock Turtle and Gryphon. She encounters Rabbit again there, who is taking a tour for some reason. Rabbit starts trying to win her over, and the first of many musical numbers takes place as Rabbit dances his way to the employee break room.

Meanwhile, Rabbit is also having financial difficulties of some kind. He is in debt to Queenie, or Queenie resents Rabbit having rejected her at some point in the past, I'm not sure. Queenie has hired a pair of snipers to kill Rabbit. Alice also visits her ex-husband, an airplane pilot named Cheshire Cat. Mock Turtle and Gryphon would like Alice to fall in love with one of them, but they don't have a chance, since she is falling in love with Rabbit.

Much later in the movie, after a brief animated sequence, there's a number (another dream/ hallucination) in a disco with most people wearing mannequin-like masks, and Alice wearing a white nightgown. She follows Rabbit out, and she's captured by revelers in the street dressed as if for a Renaissance fair. She's saved from having her head chopped off by a rope ladder dangling from a helicopter, which later seems to explode. This introduces another musical sequence, "I'm a Psychiatrist."

A lot of other things happen in the movie. There are a lot more musical numbers in it than the average, more typical musical, I think. It's an odd movie, and I think it would appeal more to people inclined towards odd musicals like Shock Treatment (1981) and True Stories (1986).

Curiously, this "Alice" abounds in references to Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland," but its narrative hardly has anything to do with that classic children's literature outside of a vestige of a circular plot. While, having recently read the stories and been since seeking out related films, I enjoy the unexpected placements throughout of lines from the Alice books, but besides that and characters adopting names from those in the literary source, minus the animal or otherwise grotesque costumes, this is an otherwise flimsy, if still somewhat fun and decidedly light, rom-com musical with an even more flimsy assassination subplot. The original screenplay, such as it is, deserves little credit, then, in my estimation, although the episodes get appreciably more disconnected near the end. As for the music, while Lulu has, of course, a powerful voice, the lip syncing by Sophie Barjac, as the film's Alice, is inconsistent. The best part is that the camera sometimes joins in the picture's dancing--moving and cutting along with the movement of the figures, from the Rabbit's tap dancing to the a more free-flowing form of dance following the "talk in song" at the party at the residence of Queenie. "Now, change the glasses, please."

The beginning with the (White) Rabbit as a jogger in white clothes and late for an important date is a nice start to the Carrollian references, although this descends into a meet-cute and budding romance with the adult Alice and the even more inane assassination subplot, which never does seem to make any sense, but does bring the Queenie (or Hearts) into things and, less so, her pal, the non-hat-wearing Hatter. Moreover, I wish Alice's ex-lover, the Cheshire Cat, was never portrayed in the picture; not only because his scene adds nothing, it would've been an amusing allusion to the character's invisibility methinks. And how is there a woman here named Mona, but not Mabel, the girl who was a source of some of Alice's identity confusion in the book. I also thought the Gryphon and Mock Turtle, Alice's friends here, were played more like Tweedledee and Tweedledum from the second book, "Through the Looking-Glass," which would've made the chess prop in their scenes apt, with chess being the game of the sequel, as opposed to the pack of cards of the original. The Duchess as a gay hairdresser was rather surprisingly amusing, though. The Caterpillar as a crabby cabbie less so. On the other hand, long before "The Matrix" (1999) and all its "Alice in Wonderland" references, this Alice also takes the red pill. Although there are no costumes or settings based on John Tenniel's illustrations, there is a slight mask motif. Overall, however, most of the nonsense isn't found in quoting Carroll or Tenniel, but in the musical, which is all over the place: tap and ballroom dancing, hints of country, mostly rock and roll, and, curiouser and curiouser, disco.

This is one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen. I picked it up kind of randomly at the video store, thinking it would be a silly musical. It ended up being like a two-hour movie about Willy Wonka's Oompa Loompas, not in subject matter but in the weird feeling it gives you. I don't recommend this movie, but I felt like I had to comment about it somewhere just to get it out of my system. There should be a support group for people who have seen this film.