Angel-A (2005)

Luc Besson, fresh from a six year absence, returns to the small scale with "Angel-A," a black-and-white fairy tale about a failed con man and the statuesque angel who drops into the Seine to save him. Jamel Debbouze plays André, a Moroccan swindler with one working arm, a pile of debts, and an American citizenship secured by lottery. Rie Rasmussen looms over him as Angela, all cheekbones and patience. The casting deserves a note of mild credit: Debbouze's heritage is folded into the character without ceremony or announcement, which is how these things used to work. Nothing is made of it, and nothing needs to be.

Angela arrives with a pledge. He saved her, so she belongs to him, and she will spend the remainder of the film solving his problems and affirming his worth. She negotiates with gangsters, knocks men unconscious in a nightclub bathroom, and explains at length that he is worth saving. The arrangement is devotional, and reading it as a feminist statement would require an act of interpretive violence. She is a muse with wings, a job title that went out of fashion and never got replaced. The film's creditors are menacing, but they are personal monsters, not a system. Nobody blames capital. The weather is never discussed.

Where the film does lean into its sermon is the self-esteem material, delivered through dialogue that critics found clunky and expository, and the critics were correct. Besson drew it from a real moment in which a girlfriend forced him to look into a mirror and say nice things about himself, and the screenplay carries that origin like a stone in its shoe. The moral is intimate, not political. An angel descends on Paris to tell one man that he matters, and the city, shot beautifully and for free, says nothing back. It is a small, sincere film about a man learning to like himself, and it asks nothing of the culture beyond a willingness to watch him do it.

Thematic tags: none apply. Oscar winner: no. Sequel, remake, true story, book adaptation, superhero, box office number one: none of these. The film is an original screenplay, modestly received, and content to remain so.