As I didn’t care for Christophe Honore‘s Sorry Angel, I slipped out of the theatre after…oh, 85 minutes or so. Life is short.
Sorry Angel is actually a well-written, better-than-decent period drama (early ’90s) about a couple of gay guys separated by age and education levels, but influencing each other for the better in various open-ended, whatever-the-fuck ways. It’s not a terrible thing to sit through, but it kind of meanders along without a great deal happening. Then I began to realize that nothing actually would happen. I began to exhale audibly and glance at my watch around the 45-minute mark.
The main protagonist is Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps), an HIV-positive writer in his late 30s, living with a young son. The romantic interest is Arthur (Vincent LaCoste), a 22 year-old bisexual lightweight. They both struck me as relentlessly self-obsessed, thinking about their schtufenhaufers above everything else, and given to blah-blahing about whatever comes into their heads. Plus they’re pathetically addicted to cigarettes. I started out merely disliking these guys, but I soon graduated into despising and then hating the ground they stood on.
A friend who attended my 7 pm screening has just written that “Sorry Angel had no reason whatsoever to be 132 minutes long.”
There’s a stand-out scene in which a dying gay guy with Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions gets into a bathtub with Jacques. (He resists the idea at first but Jacques pulls him in.) They talk things over in a murmuring, open-hearted fashion, like old marrieds. I respect the inherent sadness and emotional candor and whatnot, and I doubt if I’ll ever forget this scene. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel…uhm, uneasy? Does this make me an asshole?
And the cigarettes! There isn’t a single scene in Sorry Angel in which someone doesn’t light up. Jesus H. Christ, can you give those stinkweeds a rest? The smoking in this movie smokes is so relentless I felt I was getting early-stage cancer from just watching this.
On top of which I prefer modestly-behaved, straight-friendly gay films like Call Me By Your Name, Moonlight, Brokeback Mountain and The Times of Harvey Milk. Oh, I’m sorry — does that make me sound like a heterosexual straight-washer? If you want to call me that, fine, but I’m not a big fan of sticky, cummy, in-your-face sexual behavior a la Sorry Angel, 120 Beats per Minute, John Cameron Mitchell‘s Shortbus, Taxi Zum Klo and so on. I prefer films that hold back on that stuff. Sorry, p.c. brownshirts, but I’m allowed to have this opinion.