Review of Angel-A (2005) by Manolo P — 05 Dec 2016

Being Luc Besson?s foray away from genrefilmmaking back towards a more character-oriented film, Angel-A sounded like a potentially stylish piece of world cinema.

It would appear that in the many years since Leon: The Professional (1994), Luc Besson has forgotten how to direct a feature with any actual characters whatsoever. Seeing as this is his first film as a director since The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), his continued trend of insufficient director reminds us how much his better days are behind him.

The problem with Angel-A being a character piece is the fact that it doesn't actually have any characters to come with it. Throughout the film we gather nothing about the protegonist's story, leaving his past completely enigmatic. The elusive nature of the character is maintained over the course of the story as we gather an understanding of his identity based on how he interacts with the titular character Angel-A rather than who he is. But this isn't interesting in the slightest. Seriously, not at all. The story in Angel-A centres around two shallow characters who have nothing interesting to say or do as we see a strange bond develop between them. It's clear that much of the film has been influenced by the brilliance of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995) which was also about two strangers who learned everything they needed to about each other during a brief chance encounter in a French setting. But while Richard Linklater found brilliance in a film which essentially had no plot and just characters, Luc Besson forsakes both. The man is recognised for his tendency to steal themes from Hollywood films to the point that he was recently sued for copying the plot of Escape from New York (1981) in his far lesser action thriller Lockout (2012), and Angel-A depicts him doing the exact same thing with a drama. This doesn't make any sense because the director has rarely made anything successful in terms of genuine character drama. While Leon: The Professional (1994) remains nothing short of a cinematic masterpiece, a large asset to the film's success was its concept on top of its characters. The director is a man who specialised in concepts, and even when he made non-genre specific films such as Subway (1985) and Le Grand Bleu (1988). With Angel-A, there is almost no concept. For some reason there is a fantasy element as an afterthought which feels heavily plagiarised from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1987) yet ultimately couldn't have less to do with the plot and just doesn't make sense. In a film which is about literally nothing, the fantasy aspect of the story has nothing to do with the rest of it. So by the end of the film, it simply feels like audiences have sat through an overly long slideshow of pretty pictures which seems to pretend as if it has a story.

Angel-A is the kind of film which takes the director back to his early days in popularising the cinema du look movement. This movement came into play as a new wave of French cinema which was focused mixing themes from high and low class films as the backdrop to a dominant focus on visual brilliance. While this was progressive back in its heyday, now it's just a tiring chore to sit through again. Luc Besson's directorial debut was a black-and-white silent film called Le Dernier Combat (1983), a popular film to which critic Dave Kehr called the absence of dialogue "an effective alibi for a technically proficient filmmaker who really has nothing to say." In Angel-A, we can see this all over again without the same spectacle of a genre film to hide it. There's only so visual you can get when making a romantic drama, and Angel-A hits the limit with it. The black-and-white colour palette gives the film a soothing feeling while the cinematography is absolutely beautifully executed, but the material that all this captures is far from sufficient. This is not the kind of film that Luc Besson is the appropriate director to make because his specialisation is in being a genre filmmaker rather than the creator on intricate drama. The genre in Angel-A fails to establish itself because it's an offbeat romantic drama with inconsistent elements of fantasy and comedy. While the film is pretty and some moments are visually pleasing, it doesn't entertain in any of the generic responsibilities that it takes on. The dialogue is so dull that I cannot actually remember a single thing that was said in the films and don't care enough to try while the entire relationship between the two central characters is too melodramatic to effectively elicit any laughs. And like I said, the fantasy element is just too arbitrary for its own good. The film may only be 90 minutes long, but any feature length film where nothing happens and there is no gimmicks clever enough to distract audiences from its lack of script does not have the right to exist as a film. Viewers with a low standard for storytelling may appreciate the visual style, but audiences who know exactly what Luc Besson is worst at will get to experience it in a lifeless dramatic form rather than in any overblown format where action scenes and visual effects are enough to disguise it all. Some audiences may appreciate his ambition to step back from creating an overblown spectacle for once and focus on the simpler aspects of a film, but the issue is that he brings the same errors he has applied to every overblown one-dimension action thriller he has spawned and transfers them into a small scale character drama. The result is a suggestion that he is not the kind of man who can actually work on a low budget given how small the costs were for Angel-A. But since his big budget films aren't always that much better, he just can't catch a break either way.

Angel-A carries poetic cinematography, but it also has the same one-dimensional characters and lack of a story from Luc Besson's lesser films without enough of a spectacle to hide it.