CINEMA: Angel

The great problem with melodrama in the high style is it can so very easily descend into histrionic farce, and that’s exactly what happens here in a film that is so over-cooked it’s like the worst kind of am dram.

The normally restrained Romola Garai stars as young writer Angel Deverell, whose rags to riches life story forms the basis of the movie, which itself is anything but restrained. Here we get madness, miscarriage, sickness, illicit Sapphic love, a huge monstrosity of a house named Paradise, a philandering husband and amputation, but not necessarily in that order.

All of this would trouble the sanest of souls, but Angel, a woman who in the past would have been described as ‘flighty’, isn’t exactly sane to begin with and as she gets more deranged so too do her costumes and so too does the acting. Director Francois Ozon wanted to make a film in the style of those great 1930s Hollywood ‘women’s pictures’ full of passion-filled glances and pounding hearts in heaving bosoms, unfortunately this is so over the top and appalling, it’s almost unwatchable.       Dee Pilgrim