What do Jean Cocteau, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, Sergei Eisenstein, Mary Ellen Bute, Slavko Vorkapich and Joseph Cornell have in common? If you're familiar with all of them, you probably are or were in film studies. They're all early experimental film makers. If you think that you enjoy "art house" flicks because you've caught a Truffaut or Fellini film once or twice, wait until you get a load of the work of these artists. At its most extreme, we're talking... no narrative... no characters... no semblance of rhyme or reason whatsoever. We're talking MOOD. We're talking VISUAL POETRY. And, yeah... we're talking PRETENTIOUS. But who gives a damn? If there's a place for "Santa with Muscles," there's a place for pretentious, too. [Actually... scratch that. If there's a place for John Murlowski/Hulk Hogan movies, it's the trash.]
If you're not familiar with any of the aforementioned directors, I'd probably say that the closest thing you've seen to the dazzling cinematography of "L'Ange" would be the dream sequences of David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" or Tarsem Singh's "The Cell." If you haven't seen either of those movies... I honestly don't know what to tell you. Many directors, in fact, employ Bokanowski's techniques as devices in their films. The main differences are... first... they didn't start using them in 1982. In fact, it's taken them the better part of twenty years to catch up with him. Second, they don't make whole films that way. Whole films of eerie avant-garde images don't sell at the box office. Hollywood hasn't financed experimental cinema in over sixty years; if you really think that Lynch and Scorsese's films are daring... well... that's you.
"L'Ange" is a wonderful film. Simply put. See it yourself. There's no reason to describe what's in it, because everyone must have a different experience of this film, even if that includes sleeping, walking out, screaming or falling into a hypnotically-induced torpor. Patrick Borkanowski is not an important director... he's an important artist. In "The Critic as Artist," Wilde said, "Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways." I'm not sure exactly in which way "L'Ange" spoke to me, but I can tell you this: This is a creepy little peace of heaven.
