Hometheatre | Glad Eye

Review of Angel, a film by the award-winning French new New Wave filmmaker François Ozon, and Blindness directed by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles.

Angel
Moserbaer/Lumiere Movies, Rs 399
Rating: ** 1/2

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But is it deep?

Run this test on someone you plan to watch this film with. Don't tell him or her that it's a film by the award-winning French new New Wave filmmaker François Ozon, or that it was nominated in the best film category at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival. There's a 98 per cent chance that as soon as the film starts rolling, your companion will believe himself of herself settling down to a melodramatic, over-the-top 1960s period movie about a young woman in the first decade of 20th England who craves to be famous as a writer of romances and does become one, but not without ending her life in, well, over-the-top misery.

As in his other films, Ozon is more interested in the way in which he tells his story than the story itself. Angel, based on novelist Elizabeth Taylor lush-as-a-velvet-carpet 1957 novel, is really a period film with a vengeance. Not only does it replicate the high kitsch of Edwardian society but it faithfully mirrors the swooning corniness of much of 1950s cinematic aesthetics.

Romola Garai as Angel looks darn pretty all right — and is exceedingly irritating and spoilt, as her character is supposed to be — while her 'bohemian from the nobility' beau and husband, Esmé (Michael Fassbinder) draws our sympathy. Sam Neill, as the publisher who discovers Angel, seems downright nervous surrounded by actors acting as hyperventilating characters.

The only way that you can make out that this isn't a remake of a 70s-80s Hindi movie is by taking a look at the interviews with some cast members that are in an extra feature of the DVD.

Only then can your companion figure out that this film's supposed to be an extremely subtler study of kitsch, rather than hi-jinx bad acting and filmmaking in itself. (A thought: how about a Karan Johar movie made by Shyam Benegal?)

Blindness
PVR Home Entertainment, Rs 399
Rating: *

Can't see, don't see

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man may be the king, but in this rather soppy, only occasionally disturbing science fiction-disaster movie by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, Julian Moore plays a woman in a quarantined and abandoned hospital surrounded by people struck by a worldwide epidemic of 'white blindness'.

The premise isn't bad and one would have hoped that the man who made the gritty, kinetic City of God would do something that takes us to the edge of our seats. We are taken to the edge of preachiness and boredom and tipped over instead.

Mark Ruffalo plays Moore's rather pathetic (and blind) husband, making the subliminal point, I guess, that when it comes to the crunch (read: savage tribalism in a blind world), men are wusses.

Gael Garcia Bernal (Motorcycle Diaries, Amores Perros), is the only saving grace, playing a vicious, young, blind thug who terrorises other inmates in the darkness. Highly avoidable, unless you're into opening night movies they show at Cannes. (They showed this in the 2008 festival.)