On the Head of a Pin

Luc Besson's Angel-A

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work, and their selves, to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." - Anton Ego, from Pixar Studio's Ratatouille1

In Luc Besson's 2005 film, Angel-A, an out-of-luck Parisian named André is ready to jump off a bridge into the Seine, when a beautiful woman (Angela) beats him to it. She takes the plunge, he rescues her from drowning, and the two team up to get their lives back in order.

Their path leads through gangsters, pimps, horse races and strip clubs (this is a Luc Besson film, after all), before winding up (less characteristically) at Notre Dame Cathedral, and nearly at the gates of Heaven itself. En route, the two of them share a few touching moments: Angela is (of course) sent down from Heaven to teach André that he is lovable, and when she has him look in the mirror to tell himself so, he can't do it: "It's difficult," he stammers, but persists, tears in his eyes, till he manages to spit it out: "Je t'aime," he tells his reflection quietly.

If a film is entertaining, and manages to inspire or interest us toward a few moment's reflection, then perhaps any further discussion of it is beside the point—as esoteric as a medieval philosopher questioning how many angels could fit on the point of a needle.

But Angel-A is just as filled with touchy moments as touching ones: at one point, Angela whores herself to every man in a club, in order to help settle one of André many debts. (Angel-A is Wings of Desire meets Risky Business.) Later, we hear an alternate version of this story, in which Angela did not actually have sex with the 99 men, but simply lured them to a bathroom, robbed them, and bludgeoned them unconscious. Whew, that's much better!

The movie is one-half a fairy tale: a sweet man, who was never shown love, learns to treat people with kindness and honesty, and thus turns his life around. But it's a half-articulated moral, because in the world of Angel-A, only select actions have consequences; everything else can be solved by the six-foot tall, blonde-haired deus ex machina in the short black dress.

By the end of the movie, Angela has helped André realize his true nature; and his thanks to her is to lure her away from her own true nature: as she spreads her wings to fly back to Heaven, he clings on to her and brings her crashing back down to Earth, to "save" her and return her to the only place she could ever be happy: at the side of a man.2

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1. I might have thought differently of Angel-A if I hadn't seen it back to back with Ratatouille, and noticed that apart from the pimping and whoring on the one hand, and the cooking and eating on the other, the two stories are almost exactly the same.

2. Luc Besson's brand of well-regarded schlock—including The Professional and La Femme Nikita—has come with its own mostly-well-regarded brand of "feminism": in his films, the girls kick ass. But they also take all their orders from men, and in the end, it is always the men who succeed or fail to make them happy.

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