Plaire, aimer et courir vite

The person who saw Sorry Angel with me initially mislabeled it as another gay-AIDS-relationship movie, missing the point: It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. Christophe Honore never lacks ideas, and--to his good fortune--he does what he pleases. He takes risks and successfully avoids cliches; Honore is one of the world's brightest, funniest, savvy auteurs...His movies are earmarked by nostalgic romanticism, but they never wallow in the past because he is able to pay tribute without imitation, a technique that evades so many of his contemporaries.

Sorry Angel is about relationships. You do not need to be gay to watch it, but you need to understand humanity and compassion. Honore gets to the meat without chewing on the fat while his poignant dialogue is relatable to everyone eventually. The context of the movie (the 90's AIDS epidemic) is a setting for the text (based on the director's university years and his gay idols, writers and directors who died from the disease) but it is the subtext, Honore's observations about relationships--discerning, unsentimental, realistic portrayals of humans both gay and straight--which elevates the movie to the forefront of cinematic reflections. Where Robin Campillo's recent BPM (another stunner) focuses on activism, Honore shows us sympathy and love during an era of uncertainty and chaos.

Jonathan Romney notes that Sorry Angel is a "novelistic film" because it presents itself like great literature. The plot might be purposefully transparent, but the devil is in the details.

I have mixed feelings about this movie. It's not bad, but it's not awesome either. Some other gay films, such as « Call me by your name » and « Beats per minute », moved me more than this one. Moreover, this love affair sounds a bit unrealistic, given the circumstances (disease, distance and age gap). Fortunately, there are nice moments of tenderness (the reunion in Paris), emotion (the last scene) and humor (Denis Podalydès' choreography or Vincent Lacoste's striptease). The soundtrack features some good music, such as the delicate song « Les gens qui doutent ».

Christophe Honore is a director who has never interested me much; Dans Paris was a bore, and most of his features haven't played in North America. He has talent, but not a narrative sense. His actors carry the movie along, but even they can't do anything about the last 30 minutes, which are a total waste of time.

Setting the story in 1993, with ACT-UP just starting in France, we are fed disjointed scenes with characters who drift in and out of the action. Pierre Deladonchamps is convincing as Jacques, and Denys Podalydes has some cynical and funny scenes. I'd really like to try Chouchen, the Breton liqueur.

Fundamentally ordinary yet incredibly self-centered, the characters in Christophe Honore's "Sorry, Angel" are not easy people to like. They are mostly a group of gay and bisexual men with complicated lives who find that relationships aren't necessarily what they're good at; even having a job, earning a living or just being 'themselves' also seem to pose a problem. The two main characters are Jacques, a writer in his thirties, (Pierre Deladonchamps), and Arthur, (Vincent Lacoste), a younger student, who meet, have sex and then go about the business of falling in love but find 'happy ever after' something of a pipedream.

It's territory Honore has explored before and more explicitly but this well-crafted, if overtly cool, movie represents something of a step forward if only in terms of style. This is a more formal, less kinetic, Honore but one still unable to shake off that sense of ennui. The performances are excellent but the characters aren't engaging. Also setting it at a time when AIDS was more prevalent than it is now seems like an unnecessary plot device rather than an attempt to get us to understand or care more about the people we see. Throw in a girlfriend and Jacques' young son and you get the impression that Honore is going out of his way to be 'cool' as if making a gay epic but one without a centre. Add a load of references to cinema and literature and you know exactly who this is aimed at. One for the fans, i'm afraid.

Maybe, the fundamental virtue of film is to demonstrate nothing. It is only a story about relationship, about choices, love, life, happiness and fall. Not for impress, not for be manifesto, it seems more a sort of confession to the viewer, exploration of pieces of life, delicate confesions and easy portraits of the imposibility to be the expected one by the other and invitation to discover, from other perspective, the life. No doubts, a beautiful film but, unfortunatelly, not the most convincing. But nice.