Angel-A
Title: Angel-A
Director: Luc Besson
Amazon price: $20.49
Small-time huckster Andre has run up squalid money debts that he cannot repay and his thuggish lenders are menacingly calling the debts in. An endearing sort of nebbish as well as a small-time scam artist, poor Andre comes to his wit’s end and concludes that it’s time for his life’s end. He decides to avoid it all by hurling himself off a bridge into the Seine. So begins Angel-A, a 2005 French black and white movie, directed and written by Luc Besson. This delightful film is a wry and touching presentation of a vision or hallucination.
As he stands on the river-side of the bridge‘s balustrade, Andre (potrayed by Jamel Debbouze) looks over and, next balustrade pillar down, sees a stunning blonde woman (Rie Rasmussen) standing just as he is - on the wrong side of the balustrade. He is alarmed. "What are you doing?!?“ he yells at her. "Same as you!“ she replies and in short order jumps into the river. Andre rescues the would-be suicide. Getting her to shore, he sees up-close a stunning platinum blonde, a strikingly beautiful woman in a tight and revealing mini-dress, with legs that don’t end. She expresses eternal gratitude to him, which she insists on repaying by never leaving him and having him, in effect, guide every step of her life. After initial doubts, Andre accepts what seems to be the role of God.
Whereas their agreement is that he will guide her life, in no time at all, she winds guiding his. The short, curly-haired, disheveled Andre becomes half of an incongruous couple with the foot-taller, lanky and elegant Angela. The focus of their wanderings about Paris quickly turns to dealing with Andre's financial mess. By way of Angela, he has gotten a reprieve on life, but none of the problems he created that led to feeling suicidal, have gone away. Like a recovering addict, he has to make amends, pay off his debts.
The angelic Angela, it quickly turns out, is no cream puff. She is as tough as nails and knows her way around the seemy side of Paris like a street-smart pro. As she helps Andre with his financial disaster in a no-nonsense fashion, she winds up teaching him many things. Her biggest lesson is that he must love himself; without this, he will never be able to love anyone else, his life will continue to be a meaningless snarl. She functions as his mirror, reflecting the basic goodness that lies inside of him. At the same time, she shows him how his dishonesty and patterns of avoidance lead to disaster and despair.
After a while, she divulges that she is, indeed, an angel, a visitor from up above, arrived to help Andre with his life. As is often the case with real visions, they don’t match up with stereotipical expectations. Angela is not fragile and whispy, fluffed together of chiffon and gossamer wings. She is blunt, peroxided, wingless, sexy and brash – the only kind of angel that Andre could relate to. As a true vision, she has arrived to teach Andre, not to rescue him, not to flatter him.
The twist of the film is that Andre winds up teaching his angel about the painful beauty of being a human, living an internse, if knotted up, life, replete with pain, a history, and self-knowledge. Angela has no history of her own life that she remembers. Her identity as an angel consists solely of doing good deeds for people on earth, at the command of the Big Boy on High.
It turns out that she, too, is not capable of feeling and loving. Andre teaches her about these quinetessentially human attributes. He, in effect, de-wings the angel, so that she can defy her boss. She stays on earth to embark upon living a feeling life and a felt life, like humans do. She gets to come into contact with her inner human, her inner male, to become a more complete entity.
Both Andre and Angela learn how to step beyond the boxes that their lives have assigned them to. Andre learns to become much more aware of what he is doing, allowing him to move beyond fear and thuggishness, so that he may love - himself as well as others. Angela jumps out of the seemingly desireable and glamorous box of angeldom so as to become more than a helpful robot, and to be able to experience love given and love received.
The angelic exists in both Andre and Angela, as does the petty criminal. They are each other’s shadows, they hold what they other thinks they lack inside themselves. They are each other's mirrors, reflecting back the beauty that shines in each.
As with all visions, the question of "did this being REALLY appear“ is irrelevant. Whether Angela descended from heaven or was simply a private vision experienced by Andre, what is significant that she was able to help Andre become mindful and heartful, to engage with himself and his own life, not just float blindly and unfeelingly along. Andre unexpectedly teaches Angela the same things.
Visions guide and teach us. As this movie demonstrates, they can be sexy, sassy and smart, or they can be scruffy, scrappy and seedy. Visions manifest in whatever form is necessary in order to help us pay attention and get through our trials and tribulations and not feel the need to end it all at the bottom of a river, even if it is the storied Seine.