MOCKING "ANGEL"

“Angel,” the 2007 movie by French director Francois Ozon is as much a fantasy as Harry Potter movies.  It’s kitch, it’s camp, it’s Barbara Cartland with a wink from Charlotte Rampling’s hooded eyes.  A little kitten of a fantasist seems to be both telling us the story and being in it.  The first half is the obligatory Cinderella tale -- the write-a-book-get-rich-and-famous-version -- so satisfactory with the clothes and the house and the big dog and, well, cats.  And a devoted woman protector (sister-in-law and, well, maybe more), far more tolerant than any mother.  

The second half is the tragic part, just as much a fantasy, about a scoundrel of a handsome man, who at least doesn’t tell her “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” but, damaged by war (losing a symbolic leg), simply hangs himself from a chandelier.  And she’s been so ANGRY at him, but it all turns out that he loved her after all -- it was a misunderstanding and she is SO at fault!   She can’t see because of her silver tears. There’s no sex, not really -- we’re only twelve!  Don’t be silly!  But there’s SO much desire.  It’s just that desire fulfilled is then OVER, dahling, and then what is there to do but pet the cat.  Cats. 

Ozon has said that he reveals himself from behind a woman and that’s what gives this the campy perfume tale about a girl, not quite a queen but certainly a princess, slipping back and forth over a knife-edge of mockery -- sometimes a little sympathy.  And also a fantasy for a Frenchman of what it would be like to be an ENGLISH woman with one of those famous complexions and one of those famous houses.  But not to worry -- the English publisher and his wife are pretty well anchored in reality.  (If Sam Neill and Charlotte Rampling can’t convey that, no one can, but it’s a challenge this time around.) One has to admire the intensity -- not the truth but the candor. Actually, these two hardened cases are fond of their "Angel."

A friend has said that the LGBTX thinkers have become the most flexible and insightful on today’s scene, because they have broken up their own boxed assumptions and gone to the meta-layer, the ur-culture, that the post-structuralists like so much.  (If only they would be more intelligible about it!)  Once a person has grasped that one’s own reality is not like the realities of other lives, everything is open to question.  And renewal.  Which is why politicians need to be prodded out of their limos and offices.  And why I like Indie movies that go somewhere totally foreign to me, though it may exist only blocks away.  This was an early idea of mine. (How did I escape the box?  My playmate did not.  Friendship with her now is impossible.) It must have been books that freed me before 1957 when I took “Language and Thought” at Northwestern where some of my classmates were aghast to discover that other people had other worlds. Xenophobia is so American, so sit-com endorsed, so comfy.

But some of the assumptions of “Angel” are not just American soap.  Ozon himself was consciously channeling Lana Turner and Scarlett O’Hara, sometimes letting the fictional dominate the actual and sometimes the other way around, but then holding back the scrim now and then to show emptiness.  Dog died?  Too bad -- but the new one is not so different.  Mother died?  Too bad.  Don’t let it spoil the evening.  Your dress is so fabulous.

The original novelist Elizabeth Taylor, used the portrait as a marker.  Surely Ozon knows “La Belle Noiseuse,” a film about a woman who insists on having her portrait painted by a gifted artist who can see her inner reality.  The result is so frightening and ghastly that he walls it up so it can never been seen again.  I think the original story was by Zola.  A little of Dorian Gray in the story as well.  It would be interesting for a class to discuss the juxtaposition of this movie with “Camille Claudel”  which is taken to be an accurate depiction of a life as melodramatic and tortured as Angel’s, but quite real.  Claudel was Rodin’s lover and a sculptor herself.  Rarely does Isabel Adjani let her excesses quite give away that she is watching herself.  (All those cats are there, cats -- the ultimate watchers.)   In Ozon’s movie the portrait of Angel watches over everyone’s shoulders all the time, even when they’re out on the front steps.

The driving ugliness that Angel’s husband/painter gets her to confess and depicts in her portrait (rather successfully, I thought) is jealousy.  We don’t see much jealousy directly depicted until the end when she goes to see her dead husband’s lover, as she deduces from a found letter, but “Angelique” is blameless, a childhood friend.  Blonde, pure, innocent, and a mother.  Cynical old woman that I am, I say to myself, “Yeah, sure.”  I wonder what the publisher’s wife would think about this even more angelic Angelique..

Another rather tossed off jackstraw in this pile-up was pacifism -- Angel’s hatred of war, not because she has any grasp of damage done to people (which she would deny even if she knew about it) but because it gets in her way.  She’s jealous of war.  So many women so opposed to any violence -- surely a conversion reaction.  (When you hate in the world what is actually down inside yourself.)

The main criticism in the IMDB.com notes is that people didn’t know when to laugh in this movie.  They understood that it was a sarcastic, mocking movie, but they couldn’t see that it mixed with sympathy.  They seem to think that there are certain places where there should be laughter and that perhaps, like a TV game show, a signal should be given by a laugh track or someone with a sign.  But this is not laugh-out-loud material.  Neither does Angel deserve stoning.  It’s wry recognition of ourselves. We’re all a little pretentious, a little more dramatic than the facts can justify.  Speaking for myself, of course.  You might not be like that.