Un ange (2001) - film review

Leaving prison, Léa is determined to make a fresh start, away from the gangster friends who got her convicted.  Unfortunately, Fate has other ideas.  When her brother is shot dead by police, she is driven to take her revenge...

Two years was how long it took the producer of this film to find a distributor after it had been made... and it’s not hard to see why.  For his second feature, director Miguel Courtois was keen to bring a new slant to a popular genre in French cinema, the policier thriller.  Unfortunately, he manages to get it almost completely wrong.  The plot is unbelievably hackneyed, to the extent that it is very nearly a tedious montage of tired clichés which would have looked dated even in the 1970s.    Courtois’s attempts at originality are pretty well limited to the film’s visual style, which wouldn’t have been so bad if he had been a little more restrained.  What we get is an almost continuous barrage of overly athletic camera movement (every kind of pan and zoom you can imagine) which, for the most part, serves merely to distract the spectactor.   On the plus side, the film has a strong cast, but since the characterisation is so weak and the plot so lacking in credibility, this ends up feeling like an expensive icing on a pretty indigestible gâteau.

© James Travers 2008

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