It was dreadful, good and ok. In some parts intentionally dreadful and in some parts unintentionally good. What a confusing mess of a film Francois Ozon. I liked it and I didn't like it, but one thing I know is that there was a potentially really great film somewhere in there.
I'm guessing one of the ideas here is : can you make a schlock period drama that has to bow to genre conventions and still convey some kind of insight into the human condition / reveal something to us in a cinematic-artistic manner. There are parts of this film when it looks like bad made-for-tv melodrama and they tended to make me squirm in my seat. But I quite enjoyed that. It was very deliberate, but the fact that the film seems to then be a 'serious' melodrama elsewhere means that it doesn't come over as being 'too knowing'.
One of the biggest thematic moments seems to be when Angel is introduced to a woman who is a devoted fan of her writing and who bows and shows her love on first sight. Angel and the viewer are left feeling this is strange, of course, and then this woman's brother appears and is the first person to be rude to Angel and to criticise her taste etc. Angel naturally falls in love with this man on first sight. Later the sister becomes Angel's maid so she can get into her brother... who becomes her husband. I hate talking about plots like this! Anyway, really Angel is someone unable to accept reality and lives entirely by her own fiction, and so she does not see her husband as the cheating boozer, but being of grand romantic virtue. It's only after he comes back from the war (that Angel refuses to confront as she's a Peter Pan figure, young and unreal) minus one of his legs, comes home after boozing with scum and his mistress, rapes Angel, leaves for good but returns because his mistress has a man friend, Angel welcomes him as if he's gallant and returning to foreverness and beyond in her arms, then he hangs himself... that the truth outs and Angel has to accept that he was not the man, not the 'eternal love' that she had written him as in her own mind. And this sends her nuts, and she is on her deathbed and says to the sister, 'the only person who has ever loved me... is you.' Gives her a peck on the head, dies.
Take a breath. It's actually pretty good stuff about the fiction we all create around ourselves and how we don't always see others in any kind of true light. It is also pretty good on showing us that strange force of *attraction* - the woman who shows her devotion and eternal unquestioning love is looked at as though pitiable, the man who is cruel to her is seen as alluring. When it comes to love, sex and attraction... we often don't see things as they are but how we want them to be; but in the end there is one truth that frames all our fictions: death.
The biggest fault is that it is simply too long. Condensed down I think I could've really enjoyed it and recommended it. It just went on and on, carried a bit too much baggage.
The biggest plus of the film is Romola Garai's lead performance as fantastist novelist Angel. Though Angel is very obnoxious and outrageously uninterested in the world as it is... I ended up wanting to love her. It is a great performance, but I suppose it has to be coupled with her beauty onscreen. Her eyes have utterly beguiled me today.
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