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Its backdrop is a rich and fascinating one, but the film is let down by a screenplay and direction that fails to register on a personal level.

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Angele & Tony (Film)

by Mark Demetrius | May 16, 2011 13:15 | Edited July 12, 2011 18:04

A thinly drawn romantic drama focusing on two largely uninteresting characters.

This wafer-thin romantic saga from first time French filmmaker Alix Delaporte is no doubt intended to convey sensitivity and subtlety by its sheer restraint, and will probably be acclaimed elsewhere as a keenly observed human drama, but unfortunately, it's a case of, well, less is less.

 

Set in the photogenic French coastal village of Port-en-Bessin in Normandy, it's essentially a two-hander. The female protagonist is Angele (Clotilde Hesme). She's uncommunicative, socially inadequate, and obviously desperately unhappy - and understandably so. Angele is on parole for an initially unspecified crime, and longs to reconnect with her estranged young son who now lives with his grandparents. Tony (Gregory Gadebois) is a lonely, overweight fisherman who resides with his widowed mother. (He also has a rather charmless and insensitive brother.) He meets Angele through a personal ad, but interaction between them does not initially go well. Tony rejects her advances, basically because her idea of an overture is to grab someone's crotch or to say, "Do you want to fuck?" He does, however, put her up at his house, and he helps her out employment wise, so she's soon engaged - not very competently - in sorting and selling fish. One thing that Angele and Tony do have in common, apart from loneliness, is that they are both enigmatic without necessarily being interesting. Would you like to make a wild guess, incidentally, about whether Angele softens up at some point, and becomes more emotionally accessible?      

 

Angele Et Tony is like one of those early seventies American misfit couple films, but without any of the panache, wit or power. The predominant downbeat scenes are uninvolving, and the happier ones are worse. To add insult to injury, the ending is feeble and contrived.