Sor­ry Angel – first look review

There was a point in the mid-2000s where Christophe Hon­oré was all set to become knight­ed as a house­hold name among a beloved pha­lanx of urbane, crowd-pleas­ing French auteurs. He had a stock­pile of great ideas, a iron­ic sense of humour, an ency­clopaedic knowl­edge of art and pop cul­ture, and a one-film-a-year work eth­ic. And then, at the moment of his inau­gu­ra­tion, he just didn’t turn up, scur­ry­ing back to the fringes for close to a decade of noodling, exper­i­men­ta­tion and films which felt more like play­ful sketch­es than robust artworks.

Well, as you can prob­a­bly guess from this some­what hack­neyed (re)introduction, Honoré’s back, baby, and his new film, Sor­ry Angel, sees him new­ly invig­o­rat­ed and mobil­is­ing all of his qual­i­ties as a mak­er of droll, qui­et­ly affect­ing and per­cep­tive human dra­mas. What’s ini­tial­ly strik­ing about this expan­sive new fea­ture is its rich, almost nov­el­is­tic screen­play which takes time to lav­ish in the detail of intense con­ver­sa­tion. Inter­ac­tions here are hard-fought: a per­son who is deserv­ing of more than a way­ward glance also deserves the rare joys of a refined and extend­ed dialogue.

Ail­ing bisex­u­al author Jacques (Pierre Deladon­champs) rarely decides to pick up his phone, leav­ing his many lovers and para­mours to plead their case on his answer­ing machine. It’s the ear­ly ​’90s and, as the film opens, he has yet to bare the full phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal brunt of his Aids diag­no­sis. He man­ages to tran­scend the stig­ma of the dis­ease, float­ing cheer­i­ly through life as an cos­mopoli­tan man of let­ters and still doing his utmost to keep his sex life inter­est­ing. At a film screen­ing of Jane Campion’s The Piano, he meets cute with ​“lit­tle Bre­ton queer” Arthur (Vin­cent Lacoste), a free spir­it with an unabashed sen­ti­men­tal streak.

The film loose­ly charts the com­pli­ca­tions of their romance, though it deals in small incre­ments rather than broad strokes. It’s far more inter­est­ed in the almost mil­i­tary logis­tics of bur­geon­ing pas­sion – the ques­tion of how far Jacques should allow Arthur into his life – than any con­ven­tion­al strains of lugubri­ous melo­dra­ma. There’s prob­a­bly not a sin­gle scene or sequence which stands out on its own, but that’s per­haps part of what makes this film so good: its ded­i­ca­tion to a del­i­cate­ly height­ened form of real­ism which nev­er pulls you away from the inten­si­ty of the moment.

Despite its poten­tial­ly gloomy sub­ject mat­ter, Sor­ry Angel is an affir­ma­tive and some­times jubi­lant film. It says that there are no com­pli­cat­ed peo­ple, only com­pli­cat­ed sit­u­a­tions, and it’s heart­en­ing to see a dra­ma based around com­bustible stand-offs which are all resolved (or, at least, alle­vi­at­ed) through care­ful expres­sion and cap­ti­vat­ing repartee.

Jacques makes for a for­mi­da­ble cen­tral char­ac­ter, one who is trapped in a moment where both past and future are vis­i­ble to him though those in his per­son­al orbit. He dis­plays a giant poster for Rain­er Wern­er Fassbinder’s swan­song, Querelle, in his lounge, and maybe there’s an over­lap in these two lone­some souls whose lives are sud­den­ly enveloped in, and quick­ened by, the prospect of pas­sion and death.

Visu­al­ly the film does what it needs to do, and Hon­oré uses care­ful fram­ing and edit­ing to keep the lengthy dia­logue exchanges engag­ing. There are hot sound­track cuts by such anglophile ​’90s favourites as Ride, The Sun­days, The Cow­boy Junkie and, of course, there’s M|A|R|R|S’s Pump Up the Vol­ume replete with funky body-pop­ping. There’s a beau­ti­ful moment where Arthur, tak­ing a tourist trek through Paris, vis­its the grave of François Truf­faut, plac­ing a ten­der hand on the cool mar­ble as if griev­ing for a fall­en parent.

Yet this film’s sur­feit of com­pas­sion, and the way it chan­nels human dra­ma through social his­to­ry, con­nect it to the linage of anoth­er French mae­stro who is very much still alive: André Téchiné.