Angel-A
Directed by Luc Besson
Luc Besson received a career achievement celebration at the Miami International Film Festival earlier this month. Not just coinciding with the Stateside release of Besson’s new film Angel-A, it was, appropriately, official recognition of Besson’s significance as an international cinematic force. As producer or director of such films as La Femme Nikita, The Professional, The Fifth Element, The Transporter movies, District B-13 and now Angela-A, Besson has sought diverse movie tastes and audiences. His movies—multicultural jamborees—are all humanist daydreams made in the lingua franca of common-denominator pop.
Asked to name his favorite genre, Besson told me, “I don’t believe in genres. I try to make movies the way I live life, and life is too varied for categories.” That’s practically an explanation of Angel-A’s theme. It’s the story of a North African immigrant in Paris (André played by Jamel Debbouze). A grifter who defies social categorization, André considers himself a citizen of the world. He loves Paris, but it doesn’t love him back. He’s low on the economic scale (niftily swiping a half-eaten sandwich off a sidewalk bistro table), and his life is threatened by assorted Third-World gangsters. (It’s the new Europe; everyone says “OK” like Americans.) Yet André’s survival is more than genre-movie fodder. Besson’s light-hearted approach teases André’s situation as an existential—in fact, cosmic—dilemma.
Perched on the Pont Neuf, André’s suicide attempt is interrupted by a young woman, Angela (Rie Rasmussen), who he instinctively saves: He drops into the Seine and fishes her out (even though he can’t swim). André and Angela’s friendship becomes infatuation. Besson takes the idea of soul-mates literally (they reflect each other’s desires and anxieties), while making that notion swing—turning a street-bred gangster story into a heaven-sent love story. A soundtrack tune called “Spin the Context” describes Besson’s jovial mix: André and Angela contrast male/female, black/white, human/mortal. Besson also updates the politically-conscious cosmology of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, mixed with the now-classical melodrama of It’s a Wonderful Life. He spins the existential contexts of those stories into a splendid, widescreen spectacle.
Visually, Angel-A repeats Besson’s B&W 1983 debut Le Dernier Combat, but he has outgrown that film’s lonely-adolescent, comic-book apocalypse and finds intellectual and spiritual excitement in André /Angela’s adult frisson. Angel-A’s B&W also recalls Patrice Leconte’s iridescent noir-romance, The Girl on the Bridge, except most of this film takes place in radiant daylight, made all the more vibrant by Thierry Arbogast’s sharp, lucid cinematography. It is Besson’s pop answer to Leconte’s rarefied artiness, which leaned on the poetic realism of the 1930s, while Angel-A expresses a worldview that’s thrillingly modern.
Rejecting the portentousness of Michael Haneke’s Caché (about the bourgeoisie’s fear of the Other), Besson reconciles the ethnic and class divisions that have recently torn France apart. Besson has consistently presented multiculturalism as a pop issue. He produced last year’s District B-13 as a response to uprisings in Paris’ banlieues, but critics only noticed its violent excess, not its political underpinning. In Angel-A, Besson’s ethnic vision is subtle, matter-of-fact, yet still spectacular: Platinum-blond Angela stands over swarthy André by at least two feet.
Rising/bending to either kiss or look eye-to-eye, they idealize human communication; their dark/light, Moslem/Christian sensuality has an erotic subtlety worthy of André Téchiné’s most globally-conscious tales. Both Debbouze and Rasmussen make a charming team. Like democratic disco habitués, they’re shady but sexy—two irresistible scamps.
Besson’s déclassé commercialism always kept snobs from taking him seriously, but that same egalitarian impulse inspires Angel-A’s humanism. Besson’s pop archetypes (gangsta-tough and angelic-sweet icons) have an emotional potency that artier movies about global crisis can’t match. Angel-A achieves its epiphany in a perfectly common public space: Angela gets André to look at himself in a mirror, to explore the soul inside his public image, the individual at the heart of Europe’s colonialist burden. It’s an astonishing moment, as political as it is deeply spiritual.
To dare a fairtytale response to global crisis shows Besson’s faith in pop art that elicits compassion (Angela’s storehouse of memories is shown in a whimsical filmstrip). Don’t forget: Angel stories from The Bishop’s Wife to The Angel Levine, from Angels in America to Angel-A are always about seeking faith.
Directed by Luc Besson
Luc Besson received a career achievement celebration at the Miami International Film Festival earlier this month. Not just coinciding with the Stateside release of Besson’s new film Angel-A, it was, appropriately, official recognition of Besson’s significance as an international cinematic force. As producer or director of such films as La Femme Nikita, The Professional, The Fifth Element, The Transporter movies, District B-13 and now Angela-A, Besson has sought diverse movie tastes and audiences. His movies—multicultural jamborees—are all humanist daydreams made in the lingua franca of common-denominator pop.
Asked to name his favorite genre, Besson told me, “I don’t believe in genres. I try to make movies the way I live life, and life is too varied for categories.” That’s practically an explanation of Angel-A’s theme. It’s the story of a North African immigrant in Paris (André played by Jamel Debbouze). A grifter who defies social categorization, André considers himself a citizen of the world. He loves Paris, but it doesn’t love him back. He’s low on the economic scale (niftily swiping a half-eaten sandwich off a sidewalk bistro table), and his life is threatened by assorted Third-World gangsters. (It’s the new Europe; everyone says “OK” like Americans.) Yet André’s survival is more than genre-movie fodder. Besson’s light-hearted approach teases André’s situation as an existential—in fact, cosmic—dilemma.
Perched on the Pont Neuf, André’s suicide attempt is interrupted by a young woman, Angela (Rie Rasmussen), who he instinctively saves: He drops into the Seine and fishes her out (even though he can’t swim). André and Angela’s friendship becomes infatuation. Besson takes the idea of soul-mates literally (they reflect each other’s desires and anxieties), while making that notion swing—turning a street-bred gangster story into a heaven-sent love story. A soundtrack tune called “Spin the Context” describes Besson’s jovial mix: André and Angela contrast male/female, black/white, human/mortal. Besson also updates the politically-conscious cosmology of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, mixed with the now-classical melodrama of It’s a Wonderful Life. He spins the existential contexts of those stories into a splendid, widescreen spectacle.
Visually, Angel-A repeats Besson’s B&W 1983 debut Le Dernier Combat, but he has outgrown that film’s lonely-adolescent, comic-book apocalypse and finds intellectual and spiritual excitement in André /Angela’s adult frisson. Angel-A’s B&W also recalls Patrice Leconte’s iridescent noir-romance, The Girl on the Bridge, except most of this film takes place in radiant daylight, made all the more vibrant by Thierry Arbogast’s sharp, lucid cinematography. It is Besson’s pop answer to Leconte’s rarefied artiness, which leaned on the poetic realism of the 1930s, while Angel-A expresses a worldview that’s thrillingly modern.
Rejecting the portentousness of Michael Haneke’s Caché (about the bourgeoisie’s fear of the Other), Besson reconciles the ethnic and class divisions that have recently torn France apart. Besson has consistently presented multiculturalism as a pop issue. He produced last year’s District B-13 as a response to uprisings in Paris’ banlieues, but critics only noticed its violent excess, not its political underpinning. In Angel-A, Besson’s ethnic vision is subtle, matter-of-fact, yet still spectacular: Platinum-blond Angela stands over swarthy André by at least two feet.
Rising/bending to either kiss or look eye-to-eye, they idealize human communication; their dark/light, Moslem/Christian sensuality has an erotic subtlety worthy of André Téchiné’s most globally-conscious tales. Both Debbouze and Rasmussen make a charming team. Like democratic disco habitués, they’re shady but sexy—two irresistible scamps.
Besson’s déclassé commercialism always kept snobs from taking him seriously, but that same egalitarian impulse inspires Angel-A’s humanism. Besson’s pop archetypes (gangsta-tough and angelic-sweet icons) have an emotional potency that artier movies about global crisis can’t match. Angel-A achieves its epiphany in a perfectly common public space: Angela gets André to look at himself in a mirror, to explore the soul inside his public image, the individual at the heart of Europe’s colonialist burden. It’s an astonishing moment, as political as it is deeply spiritual.
To dare a fairtytale response to global crisis shows Besson’s faith in pop art that elicits compassion (Angela’s storehouse of memories is shown in a whimsical filmstrip). Don’t forget: Angel stories from The Bishop’s Wife to The Angel Levine, from Angels in America to Angel-A are always about seeking faith.
