The Face of an Angel

There’s a line in direc­tor Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel in which surly, divorced film direc­tor Thomas Lang (Daniel Brühl), in search of his next project, talks about how he wants to sweep aside the hatred and vio­lence relat­ing to a real-life mur­der case he’s tap­ping for nar­ra­tive inspi­ra­tion in order to make film about love.

Tak­ing heed of those words, we’ll refrain from going into too much detail of Michael Winterbottom’s fudged and self-con­scious­ly arty explo­ration into the case of Mered­ith Kercher, the British stu­dent mur­dered while study­ing in Peru­gia, Italy in 2007, and focus instead on the affir­ma­tive side of matters.

It’s admirable that Win­ter­bot­tom avoids scur­rilous con­jec­ture and a low­est-com­mon-denom­i­na­tor who­dunit struc­ture, and he’s a direc­tor able to coax impres­sive per­for­mances from his actors that are always appeal­ing, nat­u­ral­is­tic and unshack­led from stereo­type. While Brühl and Beck­in­sale score just above sol­id, the top trump is mod­el and singer Cara Delev­ingne. She is, by an embar­rass­ing mar­gin, the most com­pelling rea­son to see this film, build­ing a char­ac­ter who exists as the antithe­sis of the Man­ic Pix­ie Dream Girl.

She plays a stu­dent and wait­ress whose dis­parate friend­ship group tran­scends gen­ders and gen­er­a­tions, even­tu­al­ly becom­ing one of Lang’s most trust­ed help­meets. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, she appears total­ly at ease in front of the cam­era, deliv­er­ing her lines as if she’s invent­ing them on the spot, and ges­tic­u­lat­ing in a man­ner which sug­gests she’s been entire­ly con­sumed by her char­ac­ter. It real­ly is one of the most brac­ing­ly bril­liant per­for­mances by a British actor for long, long time. It is, then, a cry­ing shame that the film sur­round­ing it is some­thing of a dud.