Michael Winterbottom (2014)
A film about the creation of a film that doesn’t get made, both of them based on the murder in 2007 of Meredith Kercher, to whose memory The Face of an Angel is dedicated. Is it a coincidence that Michael Winterbottom’s latest was released in Britain the week the Italian supreme court was to rule on the appeal, by Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, against their convictions for the Kercher killing? (I saw The Face of an Angel on the day these convictions were, for a second time, quashed.) Coincidence or not, it’s an irony that a film steeped in an atmosphere of glum soul-searching, on the part of the writer-director who is its main character, should lay itself open to accusations of exploiting the Kercher case to get some box-office impetus.
Anyone who does go to The Face of an Angel wanting to know more of the facts of the Kercher murder and its lengthy aftermath will be disappointed. This isn’t only because Winterbottom and the scenarist Paul Viragh move the scene of the crime from Perugia to Siena and rename the people involved. Winterbottom and Viragh aren’t interested in constructing an account of exactly how Elizabeth Pryce, their Meredith Kercher figure, died. When the protagonist Thomas Lang (Daniel Brühl) first talks with the journalist Simone Ford (Kate Beckinsale), whose book about the killing has sparked his interest in the Pryce case, she tells him he must fictionalise the material. Edoardo (Valerio Mastandrea), a character less easily summarised than Simone but who has a strong penchant for moral pronouncements and may be the mouthpiece for Winterbottom and Viragh, tells Thomas that, nowadays, ‘we’ are interested not in ‘what a death means’, only in who was responsible for it. When Thomas begins to suspect that Edoardo himself was involved in the killing of Elizabeth Pryce, he effectively vindicates this censorious dismissal of the whodunit mentality. When Thomas’s suspicions are shown to be ill-founded, it’s as if the film audience, primed to expect a solution, is being ticked off too.
There are two main problems with the approach taken by Michael Winterbottom and Paul Viragh (who also wrote the ambitious, over-complicated screenplay for Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010)). First, the principal focus of the story, Thomas Lang, isn’t sufficiently interesting. Second, the intersection of his struggle to dramatise the Pryce case as a morality tale with a structure inspired by The Divine Comedy, and Winterbottom and Viragh’s perspective, which includes Dantesque elements outside Thomas’s developing script, gives The Face of an Angel an aestheticised, self-indulgent flavour. In view of the real-life source material (and the film’s dedication), this borders on the offensive. The movie that Thomas is planning to make will be a comeback film, following the break-up of his marriage, which appears to have had an enduring depressive effect. He may not have lost his child Beatrice (Ava Acres) in quite the way that Dante was separated from his childhood love of the same name but Thomas now communicates with his daughter only through brief Skype sessions. In wrestling with his conscience and imagination, he has (a surfeit of) violently upsetting daydreams and nightmares. Some of these imaginings are Dante-inspired – a gate, inscribed with ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’, inevitably makes an appearance. Daniel Brühl’s look is so world-weary that he makes the words at the entrance to Hell tautologous. Brühl is far from a bad actor but, sunk in misery, he’s monotonous here. One immediately gets the message that Thomas is abysmally unhappy. Daniel Brühl doesn’t express a lot more.
As Dante was guided on his journey by Virgil and then Beatrice, so Thomas is conducted, under cover of darkness, through the backstreets and underbelly of Siena by Edoardo and Melanie (Cara Delevingne), a young English student in the city. It’s Melanie who introduces Thomas to La vita nuova but, since thoughts of Dante are already in his mind, it’s surprising that he isn’t struck by the correspondence between his sight-seeing in Siena and Dante’s in Hell. (There’s something of the same problem with Clarissa Vaughan in The Hours: you tend to wonder how, given her level of awareness of Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa doesn’t notice that her day is following the same pattern as that of Woolf’s Clarissa. Ignorance of resonance is a bigger issue in this case, though: Thomas Lang is in the process of writing a script informed by The Divine Comedy.) On the other hand, it’s typical of the prevailing gloom of The Face of an Angel that Viragh and Winterbottom depart from Dante in order to have Melanie, as well as Edoardo, guide Thomas through infernal Siena – whereas Virgil hands over to Beatrice only in Paradiso. Although Melanie is central to the concluding section of the film, this paradise episode has the feel of a consoling postscript rather than a glimpse of Heaven.
The Face of an Angel is more secure in the sequences that describe media coverage of Elizabeth Pryce’s murder; the subsequent court proceedings (Thomas Lang’s arrival in Siena coincides with the hearing of the first appeal lodged by the Knox-Sollecito equivalents); and the conversations among journalists and film people, preoccupied with who to cast as the dramatis personae in the real-life murder story, and with misgivings about the post-modern treatment that Thomas is concocting. The critiques of press and movie business ethics are obvious enough but Michael Winterbottom handles these elements with confident efficiency. The credited source for the screenplay is a book on the Meredith Kercher case called Angel Face: the author, Barbie Latza Nadeau, is (or was), like the Kate Beckinsale character in the film, an American foreign correspondent in Italy. Beckinsale and Cara Delevingne both do well. Valerio Mastandrea sensibly underplays the overly significant and ubiquitous figure of Edoardo. There’s particularly fine work from Peter Sullivan in the small role of Elizabeth Pryce’s father. Sullivan’s reading at a memorial service for the dead girl deserves the reprise that Winterbottom gives it but the director repeats ad nauseam shots of the angelically beautiful features of Elizabeth (Sai Bennett) and the alluring but furtive expression on the face of Jessica Fuller (Genevieve Gaunt), aka Foxy Knoxy.
27 March 2015
