Little Known Movies You Need To See... Angel-A.

For this Little Known Movies You Need to See, I’m going to talk about a movie that’s so little known, it almost bypassed me. Over the years, I’ve become wary of buying movies I either haven’t seen or haven’t heard a whole lot about. So when I stumbled upon Angel-A, I wasn’t sure whether or not to get it. I had read a little bit about it online ages ago and had forgotten about it until I saw it in the store. On one hand, it’s completely in French and it’s in black and white. But on the other hand, the most compelling selling point to me for this movie is that it was written and directed by Luc Besson, who was writer/director of one of my all-time favorite movies, Léon (He’s also done movies such as The Fifth Element and La Femme Nikita). So I bought it.

And my God (no pun intended), I’m glad I did. This movie is beautiful, in more than one way. It has a beautiful story. It has beautiful imagery/shots. It’s just a great, beautiful movie. The basic premise would be like if you mixed the more dramatic parts of Léon with It’s a Wonderful Life. And at points, I mean that literally. For instance, the dialogue of “‘stop saying okay!’ ‘okay.’” is used in this movie, just as it was used in Léon. That made me laugh. As for It’s a Wonderful Life, well… the story is about a no-good scam artist (and by that I mean he sucks at it), André, who is really down on his luck and owes a lot of money to a lot of people. He tries to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, but a mysterious woman (with incredibly long legs) shows up and jumps first, prompting André to save her life. She introduces herself as Angela (which is French for both Angel and the name Angela) and promises him that she’ll help him with all his problems in return for saving her life. And then she slowly starts to reveal just what her true nature is.

The story is one of discovering and accepting and loving who you truly are inside. It’s not easy to put into one genre, either. It’s a fine mix of drama, comedy, romance, and supernatural. Without giving too much more away about the plot, let’s just say that this movie should have caught more attention from the Catholic League than The Golden Compass did.

The visuals are also beautiful, as mentioned before. The movie was shot in Paris, so you get to see a lot of its beautiful scenery (and in black and white, to boot). There are some great cinematic choices, too, such as Angela standing on the other side of the angel statue, so it looks like they’re one and the same. There really isn’t much to complain about with this movie. It even went by very quickly because I was so involved in it.

I give it a Royale with Cheese.