François Ozon's Angel (2006)

Generally speaking, François Ozon's first completely English-speaking film was poorly received critically in England, but well received critically in France. Quite simply, outside of France the film world didn't understand Ozon. In a Guardian interview in 2009 with Ryan Gilbey, Ozon said 'When I make a film, I always assume the audience is clever'. That doesn't necessarily mean that the non-French-speaking world isn't clever, but that they just weren't ready for a film force that would come and hit them right where it counts: in the head. Critics didn't understand Ozon because he is not only highly film literate, but unpredictable: he uses a number of different movie genres, sometimes in the same movie.

Influenced in particular by Douglas Sirk movie melodramas of the 1950s and at the time rated B-movie material but now revised as quality stuff, Ozon gives us Angel in 2006, set in the Edwardian period and loosely based on the English writer Elizabeth Tayor's novel Angel (1957). Angel Deverill (Ramola Garai) is the precocious schoolgirl who doesn't read but writes, although her English teacher tells her she is influenced by Dickens and, er, Marie Corelli. Corelli is the obvious link here, because Angel, a working-class kid convinced that she has tremendous writing gifts, has some similarities to Corelli. Corelli was convinced of her brilliance as a writer, although she wrote mediocre books which sold in huge numbers, became very rich and settled down in Stratford-upon-Avon, where she was noted for being propelled along the river in a gondola.

Similarly, Angel sells tons of books and becomes immensely rich. But she then buys a palatial property which she furnishes in appallingly bad gaudy taste, fills with servants and pets, marries a wastrel and a philanderer and the audience – in spite of wondering how things will end, in spite of hating Angel for her newly-found class hatred – hopes he will disappear before he ruins her.

All this time though Angel has been a Sartrean model of mauvaise foi: she lives a fantasy, believes she's a great writer, thinks her husband Esmé (Michael Fassbender) is a great painter, she lies about everything. Even when Esmé hangs himself, she lies to a reporter that he loved their home 'Paradise' and died of a heart attack, until...

Until by chance she finds a letter in a book, addressed to the mistress Edmé had been keeping, lying to her that the money he was spending was on gambling debts.

This is a hugely overblown film, packed with clichés, such as the rainbow over the early lovers as they kiss, the images where they spent their honeymoon: Venice (the gondola in the foreground), Greece (the Acropolis in the background), and Egypt (the pyramids in the background). Angel details the triumph of illusion (or delusion) over reality. Until Angel sickens not only because of the death of her loved ones, but because she's lost control of her life, she rushes out of her palace in her bare feet in the snow to rescue her kitten, and finally she sees that the only person who's ever loved her is her doting female secretary Nora (Lucy Russell). And what can Nora say to her publisher Theo (Sam Neill) when he suggests she writes about Angel's life because she knew her best: 'Which life? The life she lived, or the life she dreamed?'

This film, which concerns the impossible life dividing appearance and ineluctable reality, of the lies we tell not only to others but to ourselves too, probably describes the only life we can ever have, the only life we're worth, all that hell allows.