“Everything is going to be fine,” thirty-something Marlene likes to tell her eight-year-old daughter Elli. She says it ahead of her drunken wedding and she says it when the ceremony falls apart and then again after she picks up a guy in a nightclub and airily suggests the kid takes a cab home on her own. She repeats the line like a mantra, as though saying it will make it so and is itself proof of motherly love. But everything in Marlene’s life is a long way from fine. The woman’s heading clean off of the rails and worse, it looks as if Elli may not be too far behind.
I kept hoping that everything would be fine with Angel Face as well, which is at least stylishly framed and performed with a certain gung-ho intensity by Marion Cotillard as alcoholic Marlene. But it’s apparent early on that Vanessa Filho’s debut picture (which screens here at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section) has major issues of its own, which it then compounds by turning overheated and shrill, overstaying its welcome and struggling to find the exit door. You could almost hear the frustration mounting among the guests gathered in the gloom of the afternoon screening.
Returning home from a night on the tiles, Marlene loves to clamber into bed beside Elli (Ayline Aksoy-Etaix), still sprayed inside her party dress, painting lipstick smears on the pillow. She knows that Elli can be relied on to sing her to sleep and to have set the alarm to ensure she doesn’t lie in too late the next morning. Elli, in other words, is the real mother in this relationship and has grown adept at presenting a front of good cheer whenever social services (which she refers to as “the children police”) come calling. And yet we soon realise that this lifestyle is already eating into the kid like battery acid. When Marlene runs away to spend time with her latest lover, she is left rattling around the empty apartment, necking spirits from the bottle and accepting cash for kisses in the toilet cubicle at school. Initially set up as a soulful, capable saint, Elli appears to be spiralling into the same vortex as her mum.
Cotillard has already compiled quite the bulging show-reel playing wild, beautiful messes and she turns on the fireworks here, almost to a fault. Her Marlene is a whirling dervish of bright laughter and pinwheeling bare arms, collapsing into a depressive heap the moment her latest dream of love runs aground. When she’s not insisting that life’s about to be a bed of roses she’s informing Elli that “humanity’s fucked up”, dashing to yank the girl back from the balcony of their seafront apartment. “Are you wanting to jump and end it all?” she shrieks into the kid’s face, although one has the distinct sense she’s largely talking to herself.
Filho’s film is never less than heartfelt and strident, like a tale torn from life, or an episode of Jeremy Kyle played as stentorian opera. And this, I suspect, may be part of the problem. Crucially, Angel Face lacks shading, pacing and nuance. Having first delivered a metaphorical series of slaps across Marlene’s upturned painted face, it then finds itself with precious little to do except get drunk on its own misery and start wandering in circles. Elli loves her mother and longs for her to come home. But out in the world, the woman’s regarded as an embarrassment. The cashier at the supermarket regards Marlene with open disgust. The parents outside school simply won’t meet her eye. Such desperate, screeching neediness yawns like a bottomless pit. Midway through the film, it’s hard to stop yourself flinching, too.
