Angel-A

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched Luc Besson’s Angel-A. It was good, a sweet movie, maybe the Besson movie I liked the best somehow. Basically a two-character movie set in Paris. A punk, a loser, is in deep trouble. He owes several gangsters a lot of money and he can’t pay, so they will kill him tomorrow. He tries everything he can, it fails, so he decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge. But just as he’s about to jump, he sees a girl is about to do the same thing, a little farther down the bridge.

So these two losers, the short dark fellow and the tall, leggy super-model blonde, team up to try to solve his problems, so she can get her mind off her problems.

And they have various adventures around Paris.

It’s not quite new wave, and the adventures don’t really engage the real city the way they should,instead it’s more fabricated, a fantasy after the old Hollywood movie – Besson loves old Hollywood movies.

I was thinking more about angela, and I have to add: it’s too talky. I notice it more because I had to read subtitles and could barely see what was going on! There were only a couple of moments where they weren’t talking, and those moments were such a relief.

Also the characters are only half-characters. The girl is a sort of amnesiac: she is in fact an angel, and once was human, but has no memory of when she was alive; she only knows her 300 years as an angel being sent down to help various mortals.

The guy has bits and pieces of details, but he knows nobody in Paris outside of the criminals who hate him and want to kill him. He has no place to live here, either. So it’s kind of no-character character, where the actor Besson casts, his way of speaking, his face, make it seem as though he has a character, but really it’s only casting. (good casting too: the guy is the one-armed short guy who was the helper to the greengrocer in amelie, who was always picked on. The contrast between the really-tall, impossibly-long-legged blonde girl and the short dark guy makes for great comic casting.)

Even making the girl an angel is a cheat in good writing. Ok, this loser guy teams up with a beautiful blonde and they set about fixing up his life, and along the way they fall in love. Good premise. Only … why, WHY would the blonde want to help this guy? And HOW can she help him? Who is she, anyway?

There could be a lot of answers, but ‘She’s an angel, and has magic powers’ is just about the easiest way to not answer those questions.

Frank Daniel had a name for this kind of team up, I forget the name. But the premise is that two people who want to get away from each other, are instead bound together and must learn to co-operate. The Defiant Ones has for example Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as convicts. They escape the police, they hate each other – but, they are chained together, so they must stay together. that’s a simple way to bond them.

The advantage of this kind of teaming is that we never know when, if, they are going to split up. They keep talking about it, and the trick for the screenwriter is to juggle this, ‘I want to get away,’ and ‘We must work together!’ back and forth, up and down, throughout the second act. Usually at the end of act 2, or early in the third act, they do part company, giving them a chance to miss each other. (in this way it’s like a romantic story where the lovers split up at the end of act 2, and only get back together at the very end.)

When Besson has the blonde be an angel (Angela, or Angel-A) who is assigned the mission of helping this guy, he loses the chance to show us the pair about to split up at various points. We lose the juggling act.

(written around 14 February 2009)