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.
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.