The readers of Premiere are sophisticated enough to know better, but utter the words "French film" to your average moviegoer, and it's likely to conjure black-and-white visions of scruffy young men and leggy blonde gamines chain-smoking their way through the streets of Paris. Luc Besson does nothing to alleviate such misconceptions in Angel-A, a charming midlife crisis of a movie that bottles the La Femme Nikita director's typically high-concept inclinations in a modest indie package.
Spinning his fable as a semi-autobiographical fantasy, Besson casts the sheepishly endearing Jamel Debbouze as his on-screen proxy, a down-and-out street hustler named André (Debbouze, with his saucer eyes and bum arm, was the star of the Oscar-nominated Days of Glory). The poor sap's luck couldn't be worse, so he does what any self-respecting romantic would and throws himself off one of Paris' more scenic bridges — actually, mere seconds before taking his suicidal leap, André meets a beautiful stranger (Rie Rasmussen) who beats him to it.
When she jumps first, André plunges in after her, pulling the young woman ashore. There, on the banks of the Seine, she introduces herself as Angela and lights her first of many cigarettes. Towering above him, her high heels longer than the hem of her miniskirt, Angela may look intimidating to the insecure André, but she pledges herself as his personal plaything. Besson is one of a select handful of filmmakers capable of channeling the mindset and fantasies of a 13-year-old boy well into middle age, and Angel-A is nothing if not an adolescent dream come true: A Scandinavian beauty falls from the sky, offering herself as André's personal slave, an opportunity he gamely exploits by pimping her out to settle his debts. Besson has conjured a guardian angel of sorts, a knockout carved from the Milla Jovovich mold for the benefit of his simple-minded counterpart.
Oh, to think that each of us might be worthy of our own heaven-sent hooker! It's hard to imagine a female director spinning an equivalent story with Brad Pitt in the subservient role, but Besson is shameless about such objectification. And yet, the one-way imbalance works simply because the discrepancy between the characters is so pronounced. No audience member could possibly find André more undeserving than he already considers himself, and it comes almost as a surprise late in the game when André (as sexually unthreatening as men come) reveals that he's allowed himself to fall for Angela. In the meantime, the two actors' misfit chemistry carries the picture. It's considerably less entertaining when cookie-cutter goons pop up to thwart André's progress — in these moments, the director can't resist his crass stylistic compulsions, and a movie that might have been Wings of Desire reverts to generic Transporter territory.
Besson's decision to shoot in black and white helps put Angel-A in its proper context as a more intimate trifle, although truth be told, there's not quite enough here to sustain a feature (the idea would have made a nice vignette in the charming omnibus project Paris, je t'aime, however). But the director brings an undeniable honesty to certain scenes, as when Angela forces André to face himself in the mirror and admit that he loves the grizzled loser he sees staring back. It's a poignant moment and a candid reflection of Besson's own soul-searching. That's precisely the humility that has been missing from his more extravagant films, where the layers of fantasy served to disguise, rather than reveal, a pain few would have guessed once plagued France's most successful commercial director.
Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc.