SORRY ANGEL – QFest Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

SORRY ANGEL screens at this year’s QFest St. Louis at 8:00pm April 28th at the Tivoli Theatre (6350 Delmar). Ticket information can be found HERE

Sorry Angel might just be the most French movie that you see all year. Characters have sex, talk about the philosophical meaning of life, and best of all smoke cigarettes in the most attractive way possible. This is a statement of fact, not a detractor to the piece. Sorry Angel finds itself rooted firmly in traditions that have populated French cinema since the New Wave, but what Sorry Angel has is just the right emotional calibration. With that, the film is brilliant at capturing the feeling of lying next to a loved one, taking in them and feeling, for a brief moment, love.  

This emotional calibration is created by a simple thing: freedom, whether that grows out of the structure or the execution. Far from traditionally structured, Sorry Angel spends its first hour letting us familiarize ourselves with the lives, loves and friends of our two main lovers Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps) and Arthur (Vincent Lacoste), as they flow through 1993 France. This is all before using its last hour and twelve minutes  to allow these different personalities to bounce off of each other, even as a few of them start to drop dead.

All of this would lead one to believe that Sorry Angel is simply structureless melodrama. My response would be: “What’s wrong with that?”  So many moments in the disconnected narrative work, that it doesn’t end up mattering. The initial meeting, the unquenchable passion of all the characters…etc, each strike a beautiful balance that perfectly matches Honore’s choice to hold on locked frames of the characters speaking for long periods of time. Even as the camera takes its static place, freeing emotions pop off the screen.

And freeing it is. Old lovers look at each other with understanding, even as the new ones become present. Jacque’s former partner describes herself as the “the mother of his son,” with not resentment, but instead love. People are free to express themselves sexually and act without bounds. This freedom leads some to their downfall, but more often leads to happiness. It’s this same freedom that added to the unanxious zest of Agnes Varda’s Cleo From 5 to 7, an obvious influence on Sorry Angel, that brings Angel into a magnificent light. The ease at which the characters love.

The respect that Honore holds for the openness of his characters finds itself into the equal weight characters and events are given. Big moments are played just as delicately as the small ones and, while in another film this would create contrast, here that would only work against the looseness of the narrative. Things seem to happen because they simply do.

Sorry Angel was strangely absent from the critical discourse when it made its rounds last year (I’m somewhat guilty on that front because, oddly, I didn’t like the film the first time I saw it) but it’s a film I hope gains traction. If anything, if you see it at QFest tomorrow night, you’ll feel something it is always nice to: LOVE.