Toronto. Angel.

"About half the films in [François] Ozon's prolific career... pay tongue-in-cheek, feature-length homage to other movies: See the Sea to Hitchcock, Sitcom to John Waters, Water Drops on Burning Rocks to Fassbinder, 8 Women to Technicolor musicals, etc," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "His latest, Angel, is a cheeky nod to the lavish David O Selznick productions of the 30s and 40s - rich in color and period decadence, swelling with florid melodrama and romance, and concerned with the dreams of a plucky ingénue who goes from rags to riches."

"The story of an absolutely tasteless wretch of a provincial teenager named Angel Deverell (a very over-the-top performance by a terrific Romola Garai) whose solipsism allows her to create drivel-laden novels which sell like wildfire in turn of the century England, Angel is a movie that is as of our cultural moment as any of the myriad of finger-wagging films about Iraq playing here," wrote Tom Hall from Toronto. "The film is a pastiche of every melodramatic style imaginable, from the trash of Victorian era theater and literature through mid-century 'women's cinema' to early 21st century celebrity meltdowns while Ozon's lush visualizations and cribbing of everything from Douglas Sirk to Merchant Ivory create a hilarious piss-take on the melodramatic form."

"Angel feels less self-conscious than Todd Haynes's faux-Sirk Far From Heaven; thanks to Romola Garai, it is also more engaging," writes Jürgen Fauth.

"The unexpected pleasure of the film is that you come out loving Angel - and wanting to strangle her at the same time," writes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr.

Posted by dwhudson at September 23, 2007 3:15 PM