Put anyone in 21 inch heels and they look tall. Too tall. To tell the truth, her distant cousin is Godzilla.
Angel-a (2005), a French film, follows the travails of Parisian André Moussah, in hock up to his eyeballs to Parisian gangsters of various flavors. We open with André pleading his case to officials of both legal and illegal nature, but all leave his fruit jar empty, and soon he is on one of the famous Parisian bridges over the Seine, crawling over the railing and onto one of the supports, taking the long stare down into the dangerous, polluted –
But there’ll be a brief interruption of this suicide attempt, as there is a competitor on the next bridge support over, glaring at André for usurping her moment in the burst of a spotlight: Angela. After a brief and acrimonious exchange, she takes the plunge.
With André, one armed and all, directly following her. How he saves her with only one functioning arm, I’ll never know.
Having landed his monstrous fish, she now promises to help him with his fiscal problems, and she does so with gusto: first, advice, and then whoring herself out in such volume and prices as to excite envy – or, perhaps, disgust – from any true professional. But there’s an interesting undercurrent: this is a job, a duty to be performed. It may amuse Angela, and André’s bounty of character defects may add to her complex reaction to her entire situation, but this is a function for her, a reason to exist.
And, as André’s situation improves, Angela becomes less and less satisfied. No past, she claims; no future? How does André figure into Angela’s needs?
How can one love a man with André’s many and manifest faults?
The plot becomes more and more organic, but the dialogue never becomes natural, and that’s a real burden on a story in which the action is the dialogue. It gets worse if you don’t speak French and the print you’re seeing is not dubbed; captions made this a bit of a challenge to thoroughly understand. But it remains intriguing, from the Parisian criminals who become victims, if you will, to André, Angela, and the unseen puppet master orchestrating it all. It may leave you unsatisfied, but boredom is less likely.
