ferdinand1932
The source book was a satire on a truly dreadful author of the late 19th century, a sort of Barbara Cartland, but only more schlocky. If the intent was to have fun on this idea it was missed and badly; if it was taken at face value, it is a sign of incipient idiocy.It plays the whole thing very straight and it seems as if no one saw that this is utter complete trash. Douglas Sirk used to take rubbish - real mediocre uneducated garbage - and make a thing with it as Fassbinder extolled him for doing. It looks as if Ozon has done a Fassbinder and taken real nonsense, which has become a joke cliché of romantic fiction and not seen that it had always been a joke; a wry in-joke on the reader, and on the original writer.Why anyone ever signed up to do this is curious - apart form the money. Why it was financed is even more puzzling. No doubt people will watch this in 10 and 50 years and see something else altogether but none of it will do anything for the creative team behind this.The classic, "Cold Comfort Farm" was a parody of the romantic rural fiction popular in the early 20th century and this work is a roman a clef of the same type of demotic garbage that is consumed in bulk.Under no circumstances go anywhere near this and wipe all playback technologies that may have accessed it.
Eva S.
I've added Angel in my watch list about a month ago, after studying -quite a few- of Romola Garai's and Michael Fassbender's performances. Some of the films i've watched with Garai were: Inside I'm Dancing (2004), Mary Bryant (2005), Atonement (2007) and The Other Man (2008). She was brilliant in all of them. So she was in this film.This is a fiction story based on a novel/screenplay by Elizabeth Taylor. It's kind of a biography of a young writer (Angel) with a not wealthy background that manages to finally publish her rich -in imagination- novels. What do you think, passionate love wouldn't knock on her door when she starts being famous? This is where Fassbender's role (Esme) comes in. Another artist, an underestimated painter who doesn't feel confident enough about his work and who also keeps some skeletons in his closet that will -later in the film- (much later) finally be revealed. Fassbender is a great performer but he doesn't get to shine here. Sam Neil plays the part of the overwhelmed publisher and Lucy Russell does a great supporting work as Esme's sister.As i'm still new in screen writing and film structure, i found myself a bit worried about the way this movie was unfolded. Everything seemed so magical and dreamy and the drama was almost out of the plot for much longer than i expected. It had to make a turn! And it did and it was sudden, maybe a bit frustrating at some point, but you'll have your turning point eventually.Since i've realized that there where practically two acts in this film i recalled the atmosphere, the costumes, the music and the colors that went along with the change. In the beginning everything was so bright and cheerful, then all turned pale and gloomy to show the depression, which you can clearly notice even in the clothes of the protagonist. There where only a few outdoor special effects that looked really out of date and weird for a 2007 production. I laughed and quickly forgot about them.In a nutshell, it was a decent film -with a small cast- describing the intense, disturbed and not very long life of a young female writer in the early 20s, but nothing more to get excited about.
robert-temple-1
Hungary's gift to world cinema via Hong Kong (her birthplace), the amazing Romola Garai, here really pulls off the impossible, aided by the deft and sure-footed Francois Ozon as director. Here she gives a performance so impressive that she actually saves a bodice-ripper of a romantic novel by Elizabeth Taylor but becoming a travesty, and turns it instead into a classic. This is one of those daring film projects which one would have thought had no chance of success at all. It is done with tongue just enough in cheek not to take itself too seriously, but because of the intensity of Garai's central performance as the over-the-top character Angel Deverell, and the earnestness of her great big eyes as she does it, the impossible happens, and the film works! Really, the result is astonishing! The sombre, toned-down performance of good old Sam Neill also helps, because he is so under-the-top that he quite compensates for Angel Deverell's wild and extravagant excesses as a character. A bemused Charlotte Rampling oozes suitable resentment as Neill's wife, and her narrowed eyes are used to as good effect as ever as she studies Deverell in the way that one would watch a snake glide across the terrace. (Or is it Rampling who is the snake gliding across the terrace? One is never sure with her, especially when she is peering from under those lids and being dangerously subdued, as if coiling to strike.) Francois Ozon is best known for SWIMMING POOL (2003), in which Rampling did one of her many excellings (she has been winning the gold star for a long time now). Ozon seems to have paranormal relations with outstanding examples of the feminine psyche, and without the combination here of Garai and Ozon, this film would have been one of the greatest flops of our time. Garai must have had to have this most caressing of directors looking approvingly at her every time she did one of her wild scenes, so that she could be sure from the feedback that she had not disgraced herself by over-acting. I just don't know how they pulled it off. The way Garai opens her eyes with that innocent stare, wider, wider, Ozon could be considered a kind of dentist: 'Open wide! Now wider! No, wider! Wider!' And it works. The film is consciously a parody of the traditional English romantic novel (you know those dreamy things which women read furtively, in the way that men look at porn magazines, both concealing these vices from each other, since all women secretly believe in true love just as all men think mostly with their organs, and each is ashamed to admit the truth to the other sex). In England these novels are called 'Mills & Boon novels', after the publisher which published so many of them; no man I know of has ever read one. Well, this story is set in Victorian England and is about a precocious 18 year-old girl (Garai, who although 25 at the time looks genuinely 18) who lives above a grocery store and refuses to accept reality in its present form, so to counteract her grim life she writes an early 'Mills & Boon' type novel. It is accepted for publication by Sam Neill and she goes on cranking out these corny books in endless profusion and becomes immensely popular and very rich. She buys the country house she admired from afar when younger, which is (you here have to remember that the cheek is suddenly full of lots of tongue) 'Paradise'. Here the director was very clever and used a real house called Tyntesfield near Bristol in the west of England, and the result is simply breathtaking. The art direction of this film is absolutely spectacular. How much fun they all had doing this! The character played by Garai is an insufferably egotistical self-delusionist on the grand scale, and normally one encounters this kind of role only with much older actresses, as for instance Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), as a classic example of the type. It is quite a switch to see a young girl play a character who is even more delusional, insane, and self-obsessed than Tony Blair, and every bit as ruthless. Such parts just don't come along for young actresses, whose opportunities to be demented are generally restricted to the more conventional sex sirens, nymphets, or other characters relying entirely on their sexuality. Here sex doesn't come into it, it is all romantic mania carried to the highest possible levels of intensity and, frankly, insanity. This actually makes a refreshing change, since women do have other qualities than desirability, though those of us who find all women intoxicating often have to slap ourselves to stop being so distracted by all those alluring qualities they have and remember that even more interesting than their irresistability is their MYSTERY. Women are a parallel universe, without whom there would be no Universe at all. We men who admire them can only stare in wonder, uncomprehending, at the miracle of femininity. We have such a good example of it here, so provocatively put before us in the context of a frothy romantic confection which gently makes fun of itself as it goes along, that the film might be called more of a witty homage than anything serious. And with that Gallic lightness of touch which the French so often bring to things like this, even when made in English as ANGEL is, the result is a film which could not be more of a delight. Sour-natured people, or those with no sense of humour, should look away now, to avoid being affronted by scenes of dangerous levity.
rosiehallett
What a disappointment. It's hard to know what attracted Ozon to Elizabeth Taylor's fantastic source novel as his adaptation is misjudged on a number of levels. Although he slavishly sticks to Taylor's plot, Ozon has real problems with - or chooses to ignore - the very things that are at the heart of the novel. Taylor's ironic, often cruel wit is missing. Characters are softened in the way one would expect of Hollywood, but not of French cinema. He doesn't seem able to master Taylor's irony at all - the audience at last night's London Film Festival screening were very confused about where and when they should laugh. It was impossible to know what the director felt about the characters. Almost entirely missing was Taylor's exceptional portrait of class - one of the major themes of the novel. The film felt like a classic Europudding - rootless in an implausible world. There was very little sense of being in Edwardian Britain.The film is overwrought and out of control. If I hadn't already read the novel, I would have been completely puzzled by what I was watching and how I was supposed to respond or feel.
