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All that heaven avows

Francois Ozon's latest film is epic campery
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 1st, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
"O, the vicissitudes of passion!" Michael Fassbender and Romola Garai in Angel.
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Angel

Directed by Francois Ozon
With Romola Garai, Charlotte Rampling, Sam Neill, Lucy Russell and Michael Fassbender

There’s much that Francois Ozon’s first film in English, Angel, shares with Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven. Both are deeply saturated with the studio-derived Technicolor romance films of the ’40s and ’50s, with Haynes, specifically, referencing Douglas Sirk’s Universal films such as All That Heaven Allows. Although Sirk had a major influence on Ozon’s wonderfully eclectic 8 Women, in Angel he’s more interested in the weepies generated by Edmund Goulding, Anatole Litvak, et al.: lush films of emotional upheaval, played against the 101 strings of a Max Steiner score.
Though excellent in many ways, Far From Heaven was finally flawed by trying to subvert Sirk’s vision — which was itself subversive — with Haynes making explicit what Sirk craftily implied under his shimmering surfaces.
Ozon has made a similar stumble by attempting to satirize the subtly satirical novel Angel by the British novelist Elizabeth Taylor, thus creating a film with a very confused tone. While Haynes’ film is far the better of the two, there is much to enjoy in Ozon’s film, though it is ultimately an exercise in style.
Angel Deverell is a young woman living in imaginary grandeur above her mother’s homely grocer’s shop in provincial England. Being pathologically narcissistic, her primary goal is to be recognized as a literary genius. Toward this end, she spends her days penning overwrought romance stories, heartfelt drivel studded with such verbal sequins as “empyrean” and “amaranthine.”
Yet as an inhabitant of a deeply superficial age (those gilded days before World War I), Deverell will be discovered and celebrated as a wonder of prose writing. Secure in the delusion of her giftedness, she will no longer ape the gentry in the semi-privacy of her mother’s shop, but will actually move in their circles.
Taylor’s target was, of course, the authoresses of the turn of the 20th century, mistresses of pedestrianism whose exalted rubbish fascinated the common reader. Angel is a collage portrait of the best known: Marie Corelli, Ethel M. Dell and Ouida. Their books were the dregs of the Romantic movement, though their spirit still stirs in the purple ink that spills from Harlequin and Mills and Boons.
Taylor’s Angel, for all of her banality and impenitent arrogance, is, in the end, a pathetic (as in arousing pathos) soul, one whom you feel some empathy for. She rises from being an overbearingly precocious young woman to the toast of literary London, only to find her cloud-built existence extinguished in the trenches of World War I, when rawness and seriousness suddenly become the fashion, leaving Angel to sink, clinging to the décor of a spent age.
Taylor is, as usual, quietly scathing about the era Angel presided over, as well as the geranium-hothouse literature that it produced. Ozon and his script mate, playwright Martin Crimp, obviously appreciate Taylor’s humor, yet they have ignored the more tragic side of her novel. By placing the story within the stylish excesses of a Hollywood melodrama, they upset the cool balance struck by Taylor and create something akin to an extended, campy Carol Burnett sketch.
Having said that, is there anything more enjoyable than Burnett doing her manic impersonations of Bette Davis in A Stolen Life or Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind? Taken wholly as pastiche, Ozon’s Angel is thoroughly entertaining, provided you get the references.
Angel boasts Ozon’s lush palette, along with engrossing, if not engorged, performances from the actors and a florid score by Philippe Rombi, where the composer seems to be lurking behind every corner waiting to assault the action with violins and cellos. In filming Dark Victory’s climactic moment, when Judith Traherne climbs the steps to her bedroom to die, Bette Davis snapped at her director, “Am I going up the stairs or is Max Steiner?” In Angel, Rombi is going up the stairs — always.
Ozon is an actor’s director, so he pulls some wonderful performances from Sam Neill, Michael Fassbender, Charlotte Rampling (one of the director’s muses) and Lucy Russell. For Angel he has Romola Garai who, while capturing the vanity and final Mrs. Haversham–like decrepitude of the toppled writer, never moves past caricature. But then, how could she?
Anyone looking for more than first-rate camp needn’t bother with Angel.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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