Alice e o Prefeito

The film is engaging, it makes us want to follow the story of Alice and the mayor Théraneau. Fabrice Luchini and Anaïs Demoustier have both great performances, and it makes it hard not to be caught by them. However, if we pay attention, while there are important discussions, most (certainly not all) of the supposedly brilliant ideas proposed by Alice are actually shallow and vague slogans: neither deep as the intellectuals who are criticized, nor pratical and effective as the politicians who are labeled as insensitive or dumb. As a matter of fact, even the (recurrently repeated by several characters) dichotomy between intellectuals and politicians make little sense. The several ideas proposed by Alice are not really connected, what makes them similar to the marketing texts the two characters say to oppose. How a brilliant attack on the financialization as they wrote may be compatible with the conclusion that the solution is "to be modest"? Perhaps this is the right film with the right actors, but the script lacks enough philosophy and political science for what it intends to.