Had filmmaker Francois Ozon ("Under the Sand," "The Swimming Pool") been around in Vienna at the same time as Freud, he would have put the good doctor out of business in a week; this is one man who really, truly understands women and what they want, seemingly without the mighty and constricted efforts that so tortured poor Sigmund.
Ozon has consistently put his finger on the pulse of female desires with the eerie precision of a fortuneteller and shown the world what it was like to be a woman; to have her needs, her motives, her sadness and joys. What's more, he applies the same warm yet clinical gaze on Woman whether she's 15 or 50 (witness the brilliant female ensemble piece "8 Femmes") and he's now reached a point where it's become scary. Yes he's good, but does he have to be this good?
Ozon's latest is "Angel," a freakishly clever piece of cinematic conceit that spoofs the grandiose Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s while faithfully and lovingly adapting a bygone era ladies' novel from 1957 (penned by an author named, not insignificantly — Elizabeth Taylor). Taylor was a best-selling novelist in her time, whose works depicted the lives and styles of elegant, aristocratic women. "Angel" was a tad different from her usual material in that it's about a feisty, ambitious femme who became a celebrated novelist in her day but was dragged from her pedestal in middle age by failure and disappointment. This is just the sort of material that Ozon revels in: he loves to depict women when they're happy and triumphant, but he also clearly relishes the task of portraying their pain and despair. The original novel is pure soapbox and full of excessive, extravagant emotions — the characters quite literally do stuff like bite the edge of their silk hankies and soliloquize on the decay of love. Ozon digs into all this with a gleeful growl and creates a world that keeps the glass-ornaments-daintiness of Taylor's novel intact while exposing the emotional upheavals that threatened to crack the surface.