Genres: Drama | Romance

Actors: Romola Garai, Charlotte Rampling, Lucy Russell, Michael Fassbender, Sam Neill, Jacqueline Tong, Janine Duvitski, Christopher Benjamin, Jemma Powell, Simon Woods, Alison Pargeter, Seymour Matthews, Tom Georgeson, Una Stubbs, Rosanna Lavelle

Directors: François Ozon

Country: UK, Belgium, France

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Plot Summary: Based on the book by Elizabeth Taylor, "Angel", this is the story of a young woman with incredible imagination who refuses to accept the world around her, and creates her own realities.

François Ozon continues to flirt with literature, melodrama and comedy camp in Angel, which is the closing film here at the Berlin Film Festival. The first full English-language project from the French director is based on the 1957 Elizabeth Taylor novel, which recounts the rise and fall of the titular penny novelist in early 20th century Britain. Like Almodóvar’s La mala educación (Bad Education), Angel is the fullest expression of the director’s obsessions, combining the high camp of 8 femmes (8 Women) with moments of pure melodrama while continuing to explore the intersecting realms of real life and fantasy that were also an important part of Swimming Pool and Sous le Sable (Under the Sand) — as well as Bad Education. What kind of audience would accept Angel on its own terms is hard to say, though an intimate knowledge of Ozon’s previous work would certainly be helpful.

In Ozon’s previous film Le temps qui reste (Time to Leave), which is as austere as Angel is extravagant, a terminal illness forces a young man to face his own mortality, which makes him decide not to tell anyone about his condition but his aging grandmother. In Angel, a successful young novelist is exactly his opposite: she would not dream of not telling anyone anything. Her work is writing romances and her own life is a fairytale that is constantly being rewritten for the press, her friends and even herself. Every dramatic event becomes a lot more bearable when one realises it is all just another plot twist that will lead to the inevitable happy ending. (Only then, life might have another plot twist up its sleeve, as in this film’s teasing coda.

Angel Deverell (Romola Garai, acting her socks off) grows up in a house above her mother’s modest grocery shop in Norley. She dreams of becoming a famous writer and her wish is fulfilled when a publisher (Sam Neill) decides to publish one of her romance manuscripts, much to the dissatisfaction of his icy wife (Ozon regular Charlotte Rampling, who played the writer in Swimming Pool), who sees in Angel an uneducated brat with only mediocre talent (when asked who her favourite writer is, she says: "I don’t have much time to read. I quite like Shakespeare, except when he tries to be funny").

Like 8 femmes, a Technicolor musical riff on the Agatha Christie murder mystery, Angel starts outside in the snow and pays careful attention to sets (by Katia Wyszkop), costumes (Pascaline Chavanne), music (Philippe Rombi) and cinematography (Denis Lenoir), underlining the Gesamtkunstwerk approach of Ozon when working on a large canvas. Like another rousing cinematic Gesamtkunstwerk, Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, it revels in its penny novel plot and uses it as an excuse for a design that seeks to be on par with the oversized emotions of the story, bothering less with historical accuracy than with emotional truth. Indeed, many of Angel’s dresses, to name but one aspect, look like something the girls from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert would be proud to wear to a costumed ball.

Both 8 femmes and Angel pay obvious homage to Technicolor studio films and especially Douglas Sirk’s brand of constructed melodramas, ostentatious back projection and all. Angel is nevertheless a distinct creature that also includes honest moments of pure melodrama that hark back to the seriousness of 1930s and 1940s studio pictures. Quite miraculously, they enhance the drama rather than detract from its more than occasional tone of period piece pastiche. The explanation of their peaceful coexistence lies in the fact that Angel, like Ozon, is a storyteller by profession, and you can feel the joy of both in being swept up in the events of their own creation, in Angel’s case to the extent of believing that her life will follow the pattern established by her romances, which makes her a tragic and deeply flawed character that becomes compelling even as the film keeps reminding us she is but a construction herself (of Taylor and, of course, Ozon and Garai).

Angel’s undying love for Esmé (Michael Fassbinder), the brother of her admiring acquaintance-cum-secretary (Lucy Russell) is the stuff romances are made of, though she derives her rules for their romance from the airy, pink-covered confections she writes but he plays by the rules of the dark, expressionist kind of stories that resemble his paintings. The film’s tonal shifts may be more than an audience expecting a straightforward period piece can handle, and like a good old British novel originally published in instalments in a newspaper, the story is stretched over decidedly more episodes than necessary (something that also plagued 8 femmes). Ozon lovers and adventurous filmgoers, however, should definitely try to catch Angel on the big screen.