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Angel of Mine
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It’s an arresting central idea: a woman, Lizzie (Noomi
Rapace), handling the difficulties of her post-marital life, with a faltering
grip on reality and its daily responsibilities, is seized by a sudden conviction.
She believes, with all her heart and soul, that the little girl, Lola (Annika
Whiteley), whom she glimpses near the children milling around her son, Thomas (Finn
Little), is her own daughter – believed to have died in a hospital accident at
the moment of her birth.
This belief initiates a program of mild stalking on
Lizzie’s part – peering into the yard of the home presided over by Lola’s
mother Claire (Yvonne Strahovski) and father Bernard (Richard Roxburgh); and
then, more creepily, the reasonably successful attempt to ingratiate herself
into the household and its family routines. The latter campaign is facilitated
by the fact that Claire and Bernard have put their house up for sale.
This is the by now well-worn terrain of the intimacy thriller,
where familiarity – between friends, work associates, anyone in any kind of
business relationship that allows access to the domestic space – truly, in the
long run, breeds contempt. The central twist in Angel of Mine’s story will not be revealed here, but suffice to say
that it hones in on a fairly satisfying “battle of mothers” in the vein of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992) – the relevant men
being, as usual for this sub-genre, either absent or not very helpful in a
crisis.
Angel of Mine has the air of
wanting to be not much like a formulaic action-thriller; it concentrates on
quiet interactions and subtle turns in character psychology, rather than
violent shocks and confrontations in the Single White Female (1992) mode (not that there’s anything wrong with Single White Female and its ilk!). In particular, it eschews the
conventional “it’s all starting over again!” zinger – which could have easily
been wheeled in as a device – that so many contemporary thriller and horror
films tiresomely deploy.
In all this, I was reminded of certain, low-key French
thrillers in the Claude Chabrol tradition, such as Denis Dercourt’s The Page Turner (2006). So it was not
surprising to learn that Angel of Mine is based on a 2008 French film directed and co-written by Safy Nebbou, Mark of an Angel, starring Catherine
Frot (from The Page Turner) in the
central role and Sandrine Bonnaire as Claire. I haven’t seen it, but the new
screenplay by Luke Davies (1998 novel and 2006 film of Candy) and David Regal (a TV veteran) appears to have followed its
basic plot outline quite closely.
I have often pondered the fact that Australian films –
especially in genres such as mystery-thriller – have an awkward time both
starting and ending their narratives. Angel
of Mine is weighed down by a clunky exposition section, trying to sketch in
a lot of backstory concerning the difficult relationship between Lizzie and her
former husband, Mike (Luke Evans). And it takes quite a while – too long, in my
opinion – to reach the point of Lizzie’s full-formed obsession with Lola.
It would have been better, I feel, to take the more
severe route of Belgium’s Dardenne brothers – whose films, such as The Son (2002), often have a crucial
mystery-suspense element – and simply plunge in, from the first frame, with Lizzie’s
stalking of little Lola, thus letting the audience gradually pick up on the
clues that explain past events leading up to the present.
Despite such plotting problems, director Kim Farrant (Strangerland, 2015) shows, from the very
first frames, that she is well aware of her greatest asset here: international
star Rapace. This actor, well known from the original Swedish screen rendition
of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009), is fascinating to observe in long, lingering close-ups: her expression
can change a great deal in a matter of moments, as she uses every muscular
resource of her face; and she has a particular skill for transitioning swiftly
from mundane commonalities to near-psychotic twistedness, as her role in Brian
De Palma’s great Passion (2012)
already revealed.
Happily – in terms of the balance of the drama –
Rapace finds her match in Strahovski (best known as Serena Joy in TV’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and a main player
in the 2020 series Stateless). The
Australian performer projects an entirely different energy to Rapace: grounded,
pragmatic, no-nonsense. The scene in which, at a children’s ballet performance,
Claire begins to notice Lola’s odd glances toward a barely visible figure in
the wings is a real highlight of Angel of
Mine – a pleasing mesh of cinematic technique with acting skill.
On the other hand, a heavily “psychological” vignette
– Lizzie’s disastrous one-night-stand with a hunky guy played by Rob Collins –
is weakly and obscurely handled. It serves as a handy lesson that good sex is
surely difficult to convey on screen – but that bad sex (bad in the sense that its participants cannot successfully
get in sync with each other) is an even tougher call. Better luck next time,
Australian cinema!
© Adrian Martin September 2019 |
