Angel (2007) - film review

England, 1905.  The daughter of a poor shopkeeper, Angel Deverell refuses to accept her humble place in society.  Determined to rise to better things, she embarks on a literary career and starts to churn out shallow melodramatic romances which she considers to be masterpieces of literary art.  Thanks to her publisher, Theo, and a marked lack of discrimination in the book-buying public, her novels prove to be an immense success.  Within no time at all the fortunate Miss Deverell has wealth, social standing and a dream home.  She also discovers love, in the form of avant-garde artist Esmé, and her happiness is complete.  But surely such success cannot endure...

François Ozon is a filmmaker who is frustratingly hard to pin down.   Over the past decade, he has made eight full-length films and has earned considerable acclaim, yet it is devilishly hard to know how best to characterise his work.  What is there to connect Sitcom (1998), an anti-bourgeois sex comedy (with a giant man-eating rat), with 5x2 (2004), a cruel, Bergmanesque dissecton of a marriage?  Ozon’s latest film, Angel (a rose-scented costume melodrama that owes something to Mills & Boon) does nothing for those hoping to discern some pattern to the director’s oeuvre.  Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, François Ozon is strangely reluctant to reveal himself and remains French cinema’s greatest enigma. 

Angel is Ozon’s most atypical film to date.   It is the director’s first film to be recorded in English, with an entirely British cast, and also his first literary adaptation.  The film is based on the 1957 novel of the same title by the English writer Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975), who fashioned the main protagonist on Marie Corelli (1855-1924), a writer of trashy romantic fiction that was highly popular in her time (Queen Victoria being one of her most ardent readers - some people are so easily amused).  Although the story is set in Edwardian England, the film’s vivid style is an obvious homage to the lush Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s, employing a rich palette and flamboyant mise en scène to show us the world as Angel chooses to see it, as a vulgar colour-saturated fairytale.  It is not evident that the homage is respectfully intended, since several scenes in the film veer towards outright parody.  

The one thing that connects Angel with Ozon’s previous films is its unflattering portrayal of women.  Ozon rarely, if ever, presents women in a positive or realistic light, and Angel gives us his most unsympathetic female character yet, in the guise of the instantly dislikeable Angel Deverell.  The main failing of the film is that Ozon never allows the audience to sympathise with Angel.  She is deluded and crass to the point of caricature and is really little more than a shallow parody of today’s nauseating here-today-gone-tomorrow talentless celebrity.  There is a smattering of pathos in the closing scenes, when Angel’s attempt to live the life of a fairytale princess turns horribly sour, but this comes too late and the tragic outcome feels like a well-deserved retribution dished out to her by the gods of good taste and decency.  Not only does Ozon fail to do justice to Taylor’s deliciously ironic novel but he fails to deliver anything more than a cumbersome melodrama that is so kitsch it will burn your retina.

© James Travers 2010

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