L'Ange

I went to see L'Ange at L'Insitut Francaise last night.

Imagine if you'd read a movier review that described a film as "A sexy South American romp with a lorra lorra laughs" and what you actually got to see was Aguirre Wrath of God. Well mu review said (amongst other things) was "Connected by the recurring image of floating, disarticulated staircases, Patrick Bokanowski's equally transfixing, mysterious, and impenetrable magnum opus, L'Ange may be characterized as a synesthetic composition - a series of aesthetically distinctive, self-encapsulated chamber pieces, each revealing quotidian, if fantastic, acts of obsessive compulsion and moribund ritual." And I still got burnt! It's not like I don't know what "synesthetic composition" or "moribund ritual" mean in film critic speak (its a bit shit) but MY GOD that was hard going.

I actually fell asleep for most of the second half which is actually a shame because it was only 70 minutes long and one rarely gets . . . experiences . . . quite like that. Both my companions confessed to trying to make themselves fall asleep or at the very least lose consciousness, but they were unable to overcome the adventurously discordant score which, for some reason, I found strangely soothing.

On the other hand, if you ever get the chance to see it I would recommend one of the following strategies.

1) Walk away very fast thinking about something else (recommended)
2) Go and see it with a cup of coffee and some headphones. Ideally sitting in a different auditorium altogether.

Actually that's not true. Should you ever have the chance *DO* go and see it because, truly, there's nothing like it. But don't expect "Weekend at Bernies". "Weekend at Casper Hauser's On Drugs", maybe. Put it this way - after it was over and we'd all had a quick drink we had a jolly good laugh at our earlier naivete - wondering if there were going to be subtitles or not. Ha ha ha. Hilarious!

On the other hand IMDB gives it 8/10 which just goes to show that there are either a) a lot of pretensious tossers out there or b) a lot of jokers trying to trick middle America into seeing something that would, quite literally, make their heads explode.