Angèle & Tony

Venice (International Critics' Week) – It's love on the rocks of the rugged Normandy coastline in this first feature from writer-director Alix Delaporte. Fishing rod in hand, Paul Martin tries not to carp about this odd couple romance.

10 films down for me so far at this year's Venice Film Festival and one of the unifying trends so far has been the deployment of metaphors as clunky as a suit of armour filled up to the helmet with loose pennies. I've already written about Stephen Dorff's ring road in the threadbare Somewhere, while Patrick Keiller's third entry into his Robinson chronicles, Robinson in Ruins, which I caught on Saturday night, featured a description of the autumn 2008 financial crisis matched to footage of a spider spinning its web, meticulously closing up the centre of its death trap as Vanessa Redgrave's narrator describes the haemorrhaging of the contemporary capitalist system. Subtle as a pissed-up banker in a City bar on Friday night, I think you'll agree.

Angèle & Tony horns in on this action too, featuring as it does repeated sequences of recently released convict Angèle (Clotilde Hesme) looking decidedly wobbly as she rides her bicycle, apparently barely remaining upright as she peddles down the road. Do you suppose we're like, meant to interpret this cycling deficiency as saying something about, y'know, her struggles in life? Hmm, that is deep... Concrete-weighted metaphors aside, Angèle proves to be the greatest success of the movie that bears her name, which is screening as part of the International Critics' Week at Venice 2010, a festival strand showcasing works from debut directors, in this case that being the Frenchwoman, Alix Delaporte.

An awkward blend of good looks and a stooping surliness, Angèle is portrayed with skill and sensitivity by Hesme, she bringing conviction to an often unstable character whose actions regularly surprise and startle in an otherwise quiet film. For example, when caught shoplifting Angèle spontaneously headbutts a wall in order to convince the store assistant she is so unhinged as not to be worth the hassle of dealing with. And when she first visits the home of fellow title character Tony, quietly sharing a beer with him outside the house, she suddenly and without a word grabs for his crotch, much to his discomfort. She carries with her an ever-present air of volatility, a self-destructiveness that keeps the viewer on edge, fearful that this young woman who invites no small degree of sympathy is at any second going to sabotage her own efforts to put her life back on track.

Recently released from prison and not having seen her son, Yohan (Antoine Couleau), for two years, Angèle is introduced via a scene in which she is roughly taken by an unnamed man against a wall, completely al fresco, this sex act seemingly being carried out in order that she can secure a 'Shanghai Action Man', a rather sorry-looking figurine she subsequently conveys to her estranged child as a ninth birthday present. Transaction concluded, she decamps to a cafe where she meets Tony (Grégory Gadebois), a fisherman who has arranged to meet her through a personal column.

She tall and gangly, he looking like a cross between Paul Blart, mall cop and Mr. Cartwright from TV's The Inbetweeners, the immediate chemistry between them is less than incendiary, both appearing shy and taciturn in the presence of the other. But eager to leave her parole hostel, she accepts an offer from him to work alongside his formidable mother, Myriam (Evelyne Didi), selling what he catches from a quayside stall. Taking up residence with the family on the Normandy coast, she is gradually accepted into the fishing community of that region, while at the same time also battling to play a bigger role in the life of her son.

Delaporte veers her film in quite a few different narrative directions over its short running time, the writer-director occasionally resembling a ship's captain struggling to control her vessel in a storm as subplots repeatedly fizzle out into nothingness. Tony's forthright younger brother Ryan (Jérôme Huguet) is particularly ill-served in this regard, his ambition to retrieve his father's body from the sea into which it was lost six months previously ultimately going nowhere, and his militant actions protesting against imposed fishing quotas resulting in naught of any note, aside from an unintentionally amusing moment when he smacks a riot cop full in the visor with a fish in the style of The Fish-Slapping Dance sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. An intimated attraction between him and Angèle similarly passes without discernible purpose, and although the latter's custody battle for Yohan with her parents-in-law proves a more productive plotline, it is still hardly revelatory stuff, with events taking a turn into Kramer vs. Kramer phoniness in the court chambers-set resolution.

The area in which Angèle & Tony does succeed though is in its depictions of the title figures and the satisfying mesh Delaporte forges between their wildly differing personalities. She can be blunt and tough, sometimes amusingly so, such as when Ryan challenges her about wearing one of his father's shirts and she matter-of-factly replies, “He doesn't need it now”; Tony in contrast is more of a sensitive soul underneath his furtive exterior, he needing to feel he can fully trust Angèle before drawing closer to her romantically. The strong performances, especially from Hesme, make you root for these two and invest in their future happiness, and it is this emotional tug, as well as some magnificent coastal scenery, that holds the interest through to the final reel.

Rating on a scale of 5 fisherman's friends: 3

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Alix Delaporte
Screenplay by: Alix Delaporte
Cast: Clotilde Hesme, Grégory Gadebois, Evelyne Didi, Jérôme Huguet
Cert: TBC
Running Time: 85 minutes

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