Sorry Angel

The characters felt real. I could connect with and care about them. At first, I thought it would be love conquers all but the path to love isn't always a pleasant one and still ita may not lead to happily ever after. That last part of the movie struck me on a level I can't yet explain. As I said, I loved the movie and even hours after watching, I'll still thinking of the characters.

To Please, to Love, and to Run Quickly is nowhere near the sentimental use of the word sorry, and who is the angel? I also dislike the three in a bed image used on the poster as it bears little resemblance to the content of the film. I will give no spoilers, but I did not see one sexual threesome. and to be honest the sexuality in the film was coy and of the 'hide the penis at all costs' school. For those who have read my reviews please see the one on 'Theo and Hugo'.

I have awarded this film 7/10 because I thought it was a good film but not as good as it could have been. The dialogue in French is brutally difficult to follow as there is a lot of slurping over words and saying things in a way that you can only truly follow if you are in the same room with the people speaking, and then .... I found the characters drab, and the bisexual Breton tiresome.

And now for a major criticism about films set in the past about Aids. Where were the films during that period of the crisis? This retro look back makes me angry. Film makers should have had the courage back then to deal with this period in our history. Films like 'Theo and Hugo' are masterful as they deal with the situation now and are up to date. One reviewer here summed this up for me. He or she says, love-and romanticism-in the days of AIDS. In the days of? This is not a past thing. The days are now. Homosexuality and HIV are now. And yes as a friend of mine said, they need to know how it was, but frankly with a still on-going crisis we need to know how it IS.

One good element of this film is that it shows a child in a homosexual household in a positive way, and despite my slight boredom with the relationships, it is at least about an important issue. French film is waking up to homosexuality thanks to a list of good directors, and the dark negativity of the Nouvelle Vague, where love was strictly heterosexual, has slipped back into the waters from where it came. The Nouvelle Vague liberated image, but was feeble on diversity and dodgy on politics. Honore is a great director, but I am still waiting for his great film.

Fundamentally ordinary yet incredibly self-centered, the characters in Christophe Honore's "Sorry, Angel" are not easy people to like. They are mostly a group of gay and bisexual men with complicated lives who find that relationships aren't necessarily what they're good at; even having a job, earning a living or just being 'themselves' also seem to pose a problem. The two main characters are Jacques, a writer in his thirties, (Pierre Deladonchamps), and Arthur, (Vincent Lacoste), a younger student, who meet, have sex and then go about the business of falling in love but find 'happy ever after' something of a pipedream.

It's territory Honore has explored before and more explicitly but this well-crafted, if overtly cool, movie represents something of a step forward if only in terms of style. This is a more formal, less kinetic, Honore but one still unable to shake off that sense of ennui. The performances are excellent but the characters aren't engaging. Also setting it at a time when AIDS was more prevalent than it is now seems like an unnecessary plot device rather than an attempt to get us to understand or care more about the people we see. Throw in a girlfriend and Jacques' young son and you get the impression that Honore is going out of his way to be 'cool' as if making a gay epic but one without a centre. Add a load of references to cinema and literature and you know exactly who this is aimed at. One for the fans, i'm afraid.

Christophe Honore is a director who has never interested me much; Dans Paris was a bore, and most of his features haven't played in North America. He has talent, but not a narrative sense. His actors carry the movie along, but even they can't do anything about the last 30 minutes, which are a total waste of time.

Setting the story in 1993, with ACT-UP just starting in France, we are fed disjointed scenes with characters who drift in and out of the action. Pierre Deladonchamps is convincing as Jacques, and Denys Podalydes has some cynical and funny scenes. I'd really like to try Chouchen, the Breton liqueur.

Maybe, the fundamental virtue of film is to demonstrate nothing. It is only a story about relationship, about choices, love, life, happiness and fall. Not for impress, not for be manifesto, it seems more a sort of confession to the viewer, exploration of pieces of life, delicate confesions and easy portraits of the imposibility to be the expected one by the other and invitation to discover, from other perspective, the life. No doubts, a beautiful film but, unfortunatelly, not the most convincing. But nice.