Rendez-vous avec un ange (2011)
Directed by Sophie de Daruvar, Yves Thomas

Film Review

Rendez-vous avec un ange, the cinematic debut feature from Sophie de Daruvar and Yves Thomas, brims with interesting and daring ideas but, be it through inexperience or a sublime lack of awareness as to how human beings behave in the real world, its authors fail to meld these into an effective drama and the film ends up drowning in its misjudged whimsy.  Prior to this, Thomas collaborated on the screenplay of Patricia Mazuy's historical piece Saint-Cyr (2000), and also co-directed a short film with de Daruvar entitled Noire la vie (2000), followed by a film for television, L'Amour prisonnier (2011).  In their first full-length film for the cinema, the directing team show promise and at least deserve some credit for daring to tackle one of the thorniest issues of our time: assisted dying, a subject which few filmmakers are willing to tackle even though it is acquiring increasing social relevance.

It is hard to know what to make of this singular film, which is ostensibly about a couple struggling to connect but at times looks like an unhinged parody of a psychological thriller, the clumsiness of the mise-en-scène lending an unintended hilarity to more than a few scenes.  From the outset, the relationship between the two main characters Judith and Roland looks like one of barely endured co-existence, the casting of Isabelle Carré and Sergi López perhaps over-emphasising the Beauty and the Beast nature of the awkward coupling.  Both actors play according to type - Carré is the drippily subservient underdog, López the grumpy, taciturn Neanderthal, and you can't help wondering what it was that induced such an ill-matched duo to shack up together.  There's not a glimmer of mutual affection, and even less sign of an ember of a former romance - just two ill-suited indviduals hermetically sealed in their own separate worlds, having as much chance of communicating as a Popish Glaswegian and an atheistic Parisian.

Hitchcockian intrigue suddenly enters the fray (with the subtlety of a hand grenade lobbed into a kiddie's playpen) when López becomes suspicious of how Carré spends her days after losing her day job.  He's so desperate he even tries to rope Xavier Beauvois (no doubt looking for some light relief after directing Des hommes et des dieux) into helping him.  Looking like a cross-between one of the Three Stooges and a Looney Tunes cartoon character, López trails Carré about town until he uncovers her dark secret.  Relief that his other half isn't, as he feared, a hooker is tempered by the discovery that she now earns her crust by killing people for cash, not Jean Reno-style with a blazing gun, but with a hypodermic syringe and a deadly dose of morphine.  López doesn't quite know what to do next, so he leaves Carré and moves in with another woman, before deciding that Carré is his belle idéale after all.  There's no point trying to make any sense of this - the plot is a masterpiece of illogicality and no one, least of all the film's authors, seems that bothered about making any of it look remotely credible.

It is the sheer, mind-boggling eccentricity of Rendez-vous avec un ange that makes it worth watching.  López and Carré's characters start out as the dullest of archetypes but become progressively weirder as the narrative unfolds and end up looking like beings from another planet.  Clearly unsure what to make of the film, López is more inscrutable than ever and goes from being a dull, box lugging grouch with an implausible obsession with opera to a comicbook peeping Tom before ending up as an angst-ridden depressive of the kind you'd expect to find staggering through a Georges Simenon novel.  Carré's metamorphosis is even more bizarre, from a silly little clod who can't walk up a flight of stairs without tripping over to a diaphanous angel of death who expunges life with a casual air of insouciance that doesn't so much send a chill down your spine as have you leaping out of your skin.  López's inability to show any emotion other than constipated confusion and Carré's ethereal oddness takes the film into supremely surreal ground for its final act, which the spectator is left to interpret in whichever way he or she chooses.  Make of it what you will, Rendez-vous avec un ange is certifiably bonkers.

Film Synopsis

Judith is such a timid soul that even when she loses her job as a hospital nurse she cannot bring herself to reveal this fact to her partner, Roland.  Instead, she keeps up the pretence of still being in employment until she finds another form of paid work.  By chance, Roland discovers a CD on which Judith has recorded a song in which she confesses she has been dismissed by her employer.  Curious to find out how his partner is spending her days, Roland begins following her around and hastily jumps to the conclusion that she is offering her services as a prostitute.  Then he discovers the truth: Judith is using her training as a nurse to practice euthanasia on those who are prepared to reward her handsomely in return for ending their suffering.  Roland suddenly sees his partner in a new light...