Angèle et Tony (2011) - film review

An attractive young woman named Angèle arrives at a Normandy fishing port in search of a new life.  She has spent the last two years in prison and her one thought is to take back custody of her son, who is currently being cared for by her dead husband’s parents.  To do so, however, she must be able to show that she can provide a stable home, ideally with a husband...  Knowing nothing of Angèle’s troubled past and her motives for starting a relationship, Tony, a local fisherman, finds himself drawn to her.  Recognising the first signs of desire, Angèle foists herself on Tony, but he holds himself back, unsure what to make of the young woman who is obviously too good for him.  But it soon becomes obvious to them both that they need each other, far more than they yet realise...

One of the French film highlights of 2011 has to be this unpretentious slice of life drama which, with its biting realist edge and authentically drawn characters, gives the Dardenne brothers (the masters of naturalistic cinema) a good run for their money.  Staying well clear of the mania for stylisation that is currently plaguing auteur cinema (and providing a poor substitute for content), first-time director Alix Delaporte concentrates on the essentials and delivers a film of immense power, refreshingly modest in its approach - a simple tale of a seemingly ill-matched couple falling in love.  Whilst the script could have benefited from a little judicious pruning to expunge the odd longueur and remove some unnecessary plot digressions (such as the preoccupation with the hero’s dead father), Angèle et Tony is an impressive debut feature that can hardly fail to engage its audience with its unsentimental account of two deeply flawed characters being redeemed by the power of love.

It is tempting to compare this film with Robert Guédiguian’s acclaimed Marius et Jeannette (1997).  Both films adopt a rigorously unfussy naturalistic approach and are set in a working class milieu, in towns suffering from severe industrial decline.  However, Delaporte’s film has a somewhat harder edge than Guédiguian’s, there is less humour and it takes a while before we can warm to the principal characters.  When we first meet Angèle and Tony, we have to take them at face value - she is obviously a cynically motivated go-getter, he is a social inadequate who would rather wallow in his solitary misanthropy.  For the first half of the film, these characters act as we expect them to, but that changes at the midpoint, when their true natures begin to assert themselves and events take a far more humane turn than we might have expected.  This transformation would have been a hard sell had it not been for the depth and conviction that the leads Clotilde Hesme and Grégory Gadebois bring to their performances.   With little in the way of dialogue, both actors have to express their character’s inner feelings mainly by visual cues and meaningful pauses, and they do so with extraordinary eloquence.  Indeed, so richly nuanced and true to life are these performances that the spectator cannot help experiencing for himself the full force of the emotional tsunami which washes over the main protagonists as Eros works his magic.

The film’s setting - Port-en-Bessin, Calvados at the height of the recent credit crunch - provides a suitably sombre backdrop for the main drama.  As stressed-out fisherman on the brink of financial ruin clash with riot police, the air is charged with pent-up anger and a growing sense of hopelessness, something which aggravates Tony’s feelings of alienation and his family’s antipathy towards Angèle.  It is not the most fertile ground for a budding romance and when Angèle and Tony first meet (looking more like wild animals than people) we are naturally sceptical over where their romance will lead.  Yet, just as a rose may blossom amongst wild thistles, so something wonderful emerges from this improbable rencontre.  The bleakness of the fractured world that surrounds Angèle and Tony takes on a softer hue as they awaken in each other deeper feelings and set themselves free from past traumas and present woes.  This is a fairytale roughly carved in granite, but when it touches your heart what you feel is not stone but the tender stroke of velvet.

© James Travers 2011

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