Jean-Francois Virey (jfvirey)

I bought a copy of "Angel-A" because of the superb backlit poster with Notre Dame in the background. I thought the whole film would be like that, and I was all the more excited as some of my favorites are modern black and white films (The Elephant Man, The Notorious Bettie Page, Ed Wood.) I have spent a few weeks in Paris over the years, and visited the city at various points in my life with family and friends, so that it holds a particular place in my affections. I expected to see it magnified in unearthly black and white cinematography.

Well, not quite. The poster is not even a shot in the film and, most of the time, it's day.

Angel-A is a boy-meets girl story, the boy being a small-time Arab crook and compulsive liar with a lame arm; and the girl being an "angel", by which Besson means a hypersexed, ultrathin 6-foot blond top model with superhuman strength and Jedi powers (any resemblance with earlier Besson characters is purely coincidental.)

The film is half comedy, with the crook running into his various creditors, being beaten up and threatened with death, and half romance, as mutual feelings develop between him and the "angel". I'm using "angel" in quotes because Besson does not have much respect for the Christian concept. Actually, Angel-A is closer to a demon than a genuine angel. She wears a very skimpy dress, tries to arouse virtually every male in sight, smokes continually, drinks, parties, dances sluttishly, does her job relunctantly and even describes herself as a fallen angel at one point. She's also vulnerable, cries, has no idea who she is and does not seem to have have ever heard of the beatific vision.

The film has very touching moments which might bring tears to your eyes, though it is far from being as deep as some reviewers would make it. Besson is another devotee of the Church of Self-Esteem, whose message, "believe in yourself", is being hammered in film after feel-good film. Another theme is the importance of honesty, though I wish Besson has applied the lesson himself and decided to be totally honest as a filmmaker at some point, either dropping his beautifying esthetics for a while (as De Palma did in "Snake Eyes") or making the film-making process transparent (as in one of the best scenes in "JCVD" or the death scene in "Center Stage.")

Also painful for me was the constant swearing. I normally avoid films that are described as having "strong language", but this time, I was caught off guard. All the women in the film are also sexualised, from the titular character who is always posing for a sexy photoshoot, to a group of strip dancers in a nightclub. I don't remember seeing other women, except for a short flashback that is not even supposed to be about something real.

I can't say I lost my time watching the film, but it was not quite the love poem about Paris that I thought it would be, and though French is my first language, I must have missed about twenty percent of the dialogues as both Jamel Debbouze and Rie Rasmussen have slight foreign accents that make them hard to understand, and the French DVD had no subtitles.

I had already seen a few documentaries by Nick Broomfield (Biggie and Tupac, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, His Big White Self), and I believed he was slightly more serious than that. But in the poster for this film (which I am only discovering now), he looks just like Steve Martin goofing around in an Alaskan hat, and this is basically what he does in this film.

"Sarah Palin: You Betcha!" is one of those left-wing hatchet jobs in which a purportedly neutral filmmaker is forever trying to approach his subject but is repeatedly brushed off with smiles and vague promises (this time mostly because his subject knows he is going for the jugular), so that he finally resorts to such tactics as talking in a megaphone at the end of a political rally as everyone is leaving the hall, or standing up during a Q&A session and shouting at Palin: "Do you think your political career is over?" before being escorted out by security. Very grown up stuff.

The documentary did change my perception of Palin. I generally agree with her politics, and though as a Catholic I am rather dismayed by her Evangelical beliefs (such as young-Earth creationism and millenarism, among others), I share her socially conservative positions and her distrust of the welfare state and state interventionism. However, Broomfield is rather convincing in his case that Palin is a sort of sociopath who will brutally and utterly break with long-time friends and associates when her career demands it, and use her political power to harass them, getting them fired, reopening cases and forcing all her acquaintances to take sides in the feuds she initiates. It is indeed scary to think about how such a person would behave if she ever was to determine U.S. foreign policy.

As a vegan, I was also disturbed by the streak of animal cruelty running in Palin's family. Her father, who introduced her to hunting, collects antlers which he piles up in a gigantic mound in his front yard ("Welcome to the Heaths"!) and Palin herself, who famously posed in her house with a tiger rug at her feet, is also known to have proposed legislation and cash incentives to encourage helicopter wolf gunning.

Unfortunately, much of the film is hearsay and Michael-Moore-ish smearing, using such tricks as (1) describing Palin's opposition to "gay rights"; then (2) showing anti-homosexual activists brandishing abusive placard calling homosexual faggots; and finally (3) showing a picture of Palin pointing a semi-automatic rifle, as if all she wanted to do was to shoot homosexuals dead. (I rather liked the bit about the homosexual who claimed he had been harrassed by Christians who told him, "We pray for you".)

The film, which uses a lot of unflattering pictures of Palin just to demean her, ends with the hoax played on Palin by a French comedian who phoned her pretending to be Nicolas Sarkozy and offering her to go hunting together and "as we say in French, 'tuer des bà (C)bà (C)s phoques'" (which means killing baby seals.) This shows the kind of spirit in which this piece of "reporting" was made. It's an interesting corrective to the P.R. Palin's staff puts out, but it is certainly not a service to the the values of truth, impartiality and respect for one's opponents.