Benjamin is a struggling actor sharing living arrangements with his best friend Alice, a violinist in a local quintet that specializes in tango music.

Alice is nervous and brittle, harboring her own private grief, the tragic death at age eleven of her gifted sister.

His relationship with his sons was problematic: the aimless and withdrawn Martin failed to please him; Benjamin irritated him and a reunion about the prospects of the family's business ended up in a fist fight between François and Frédéric, the two eldest siblings.

After Martin reveals that he caused his father's death, unable to bear the guilt and pain any longer, he commits himself to a mental institution.

Filming took place on location in France (Paris and the southwest Cahors region and Duravel in the Lot valley) and Spain (Granada), where Martin's climactic breakdown occurs.

[5] Alice et Martin had its world premiere at the 1998 Valladolid International Film Festival in the presence of André Téchiné, Juliette Binoche and Alain Sarde.

[7] The star power of Juliette Binoche, who became known to the American public thanks her Oscar-winning performance in The English Patient, was not enough for the film to find a large audience.

[5] A review in Sight and Sound described the "masterly dissection of male hysteria" in a film where "most of the major characters are scarred by family histories".

The reviewer noted that though "dense and powerful in its emotional force", the film's melodrama is balanced by the lead performances; Loret "shifty, pale and sympathetic", Binoche developing her role "with a charged finesse", embarking on her path to adult love through her lover's growing self-realisation.

Both a cold melodrama and a psyched-up Bressonian case study, Alice et Martin is a masterly opening-up of classical French intimiste themes".

Scott in The New York Times called Alice et Martin " A richly populated, observant film that suffers, forgivable, from an excess of curiosity about the world it depicts -- a surfeit of generosity, intelligence and art".

[9] In his review for Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas described it as " Boldly structured, intensely focused and briskly paced, Alice and Martin has a tremendous emotional density that places the utmost demands upon its actors--and asks a lot of audiences, too.

"[11] While in a disagreeing note Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly said that "It's as if, in exploring the scars that shape these personalities, Téchiné has forgotten to color in the flesh.

A blu-ray disc of the film was released in 2010 by Studio Canal, which included a 28-minute feature entitled 'Autour d'un amour impossible, la petite musique d'André Téchiné'.