For his first film as a director since 1999’s The Messenger, French filmmaker Besson has crafted a sweet love letter to his native Paris, a gorgeous-looking film whose crisp, black-and-white photography is unfortunately much more thrilling than its simplistic, cloying story. Time off hasn’t made Besson any less of a visual stylist, but it seems to have turned him into a bit of a softie.
Forget the badassery of classics like La Femme Nikita and The Professional; although Angel-A does star statuesque Dutch-American model Rasmussen, and she does rough up a couple of French toughs, this is not a movie about assassins or even interstellar cab drivers (like The Fifth Element); no, it’s about love, and not just any sort, either. It’s forbidden love between Rasmussen’s Angela (who is, as the title subtly points out, an angel) and schlubby loser Andre (Debbouze), whose life she has been sent to turn around.
In debt to unsavory characters and without any friends or means of support, Andre plans to throw himself off a bridge when he meets Angela, who promises to do anything he asks her. Soon she’s micro-managing his life, bullying him into improving his self-esteem and cutting ties with his criminal business associates. At one point, she actually has him look in a mirror and tell his reflection “I love you.”
Once Andre is confident that he’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and, doggone it, people like him, it becomes clear that he and Angela are meant to be together, but of course the angel code forbids that. This is territory covered already in the German film Wings of Desire (as well as its American remake, City of Angels), albeit with a much more serious tone. Besson keeps things light, but that means that the characters lack the depth to pull off the grand love story, and all that’s left are sappy platitudes.
They’d be much harder to take without the breathtaking cinematography by Thierry Arbogast, which makes Paris into a sparkling, magical fairy-tale world. It’s too bad the same can’t be said of the story.