François Ozon is playing a risky game with his new movie, Angel. It’s a lush period melodrama about the rise and fall of a bestselling Edwardian novelist and seems, on casual viewing, to be a compendium of clichés, gaffes and over-the-top acting. Is this a case of a French director coming a cropper because of a ‘tin ear’ for English (as one critic has already complained), or is something else going on?
Something else is most definitely being attempted in Angel, but I’m not convinced that Ozon pulls it off.
Based on a novel by Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one, in case you were thinking you had missed an unexpected career sideline for the screen icon; the English writer), Ozon’s movie stars Romola Garai as a young woman who rises from humble provincial origins to win fame and fortune as the author of a series of florid romances. Garai’s wilful, egotistical Angel Deverell succeeds despite possessing next to no talent and only a hazy understanding of the ways of the world (her first novel has a character opening a champagne bottle with a corkscrew), but her good fortune isn’t destined to last forever.
Ozon films this saga with a straight face, but the overripe dialogue, dodgy back-projection and unrestrained acting all signal that he is smirking behind his hand.
Ozon has flirted with kitsch before. His 2002 movie 8 Women is a tongue-in-cheek mystery-cum-musical that features a snowbound country mansion, a dead body and eight suspects who break into song at the drop of a clue. Self-consciously theatrical and very camp, it comes across as the bizarre offspring of an unlikely marriage between Agatha Christie and Vincente Minnelli.
With Angel, Ozon’s model is the lush, overripe melodramas made by Douglas Sirk in 1950s Hollywood. At the time, critics sneeringly dismissed films such as Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows. Now they’re hailed as classics.
It’s highly unlikely that Ozon’s movie will attain the same status, but a recent film that also pays homage to Sirk may well do so. Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven (showing on TV today) depicts a world of hidden desires in affluent 1950s Connecticut, but his highly stylised use of rich colours and lavish orchestration serves to express his characters’ inner lives rather than mock them.
Haynes surely admires and sympathises with his heroine (magnificently played by Julianne Moore), but Ozon’s attitude to his protagonist is less generous. Garai certainly throws herself whole-heartedly into the part of Angel and her performance is fearless, as if she’s walking a tightrope over an abyss of excess. In the end, though, we don’t care enough about her to make the film a really successful tearjerker. Ozon wants us to look down on Angel’s shallow desires and narrow imagination, not identify with her.
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