From the screenshots I saw before renting this movie, Angel
promised to be an Edwardian dream! The costumes looked rich, the settings
looked beautiful, and the storyline seemed simply romantic. Did the movie
disappoint? Not quite. The costumes and the settings were grand indeed, but the
storyline was much sadder than I expected.
Angel stars Romola Garai, who is, in my eyes, the queen of historical dramas. I mean, how many costume pieces can a girl star in? And Garai
does a wonderful rendition playing Angel, who is just as self-obsessed and
oblivious as a heroine can get. In fact, the character of Angel is so
atrocious, that I found it very hard to feel any sympathy for the protagonist
of the entire movie. However, this left the supporting characters plenty of time
to shine. And did they ever!
Michael Fassbender played Angel’s love interest, a dark and
broody artist named Esmé. His acting was simply fantastic. What I loved most
about his performance is his embodiment of the trauma that England experienced
as a result of WWI. The effects of the war rippled through the community of
artists and writers of that time, and this movie shows just how deeply it
affected certain individuals returning from battle – individuals who were alive
in body, but no longer present in spirit.
Lucy Russel, in turn, played Nora – the sister of Esmé and
Angel’s “personal assistant,” if you will. Nora is obviously besotted with
Angel, but Russel’s portrayal of the character is wonderful. She shows such
loyalty and admiration, that one can see that Nora is a person of pure goodness
and goodwill.
In the end, however, neither Esmé nor Nora can save Angel.
The character remains unlovable – perhaps even more so when compared to that of
the supporting cast – and therefore the movie itself left a bitter taste after
my watching of it.
What surprised me, however, was that the character of Angel
was based on an actual writer popular during the Edwardian age – Marie Corelli.
Marie Corelli was born in 1885 with the fairly unglamorous
name of Mary Mackay, which she later changed to Marie Corelli to claim Italian
descent and reinvent herself as something more exotic than she truly was. To
add to her Italian air, she later bought a Venetian gondola, complete with an
Italian gondolier, to take her up and down the Avon River.
Corelli wrote over a dozen novels that have been described
as “over-written exotic romantic fantasy” that appealed to a public “whose
sentimentalities and prejudices she gave a glamorous setting.” Such harsh
criticism, however, did nothing to dampen the popularity of Corelli’s novels.
In fact, any negative press about her or her work usually increased sales. In
her day, Corelli sold more copies of her novels than Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G.
Wells, and Rudyard Kipling combined!
Like the glamour of Angel Deverell's life, however, the popularity of Marie Corelli's novels did not last. Today, hardly anyone has even heard of Corelli. And, unlike the authors she had at one point outsold, there has never been a serious book-length study of her works.
À la prochaine,
AVB
0 comments:
Post a Comment