I'm actually glad that the only English language review of "L'ange et la femme" that I was able to find was overwhelmingly negative. I love the film, but I welcome the chance to test my debating abilities. In fact, the reviewer, Jane Dick, writing for the now defunct "Cinema Canada" magazine makes some interesting points about the sex in the film. It should be mentioned that "L'ange et la femme" contains a scene of graphic, hard-core sex. Is this scene necessary? Maybe not, but is it "undoubtedly the focal point and raison d'être of the whole enterprise" as Dick seems to think it is? I don't think so. I hope to explain why I like the film, and defend its content, while still exploring why Carle chose to include that graphic sex scene.
The film's story is simple. Gangsters shoot a woman to death for unexplained reasons. A man finds her body in the snow and brings her back to his cabin. He turns out to be the Angel Gabriel, and brings her back to life. They make love. They spend some time together in the country, walking through the snow or hanging out with other angels, but eventually the woman returns to the city. The woman sees the men who killed her and exacts her revenge upon them. Suddenly she is back where she was at the beginning of the film. Again the gangsters kill her. Again Gabriel approaches her corpse, but this time he simply kneels down beside her and begins to weep. He then disappears into thin air.
A very simple film with a very simple moral: when one is given a second chance at life, it shouldn't be wasted on revenge but should be spent trying to better oneself. What makes the film truly special however is its extreme beauty. The black and white cinematography is stunning. The pacing of the films is slow, but dream like and hypnotic. Dick agrees that the film is well shot, but calls it "tawdry" and "embarrassing". Any film that tries to express an idea through unconventional artistic means runs the risk of being criticized for pretentiousness, and I can see how one could se the film as such. I personally like the dream-like feeling the film gives me. Dick attacks almost every aspect of the film from the music to the acting, but it is clear her real problem with the film is the sex.
Of course, having a hard-core sex scene in any legitimate film is risky. It threatens to turn the film into an exploitation flick. Dick is justified in feeling that Carle is simply a dirty old man who is trying to disguise his "prurient interests," but from the way she describes the scene (calling it "excruciating") you'd think it took up half the film and consisted of mostly close-ups of penetration. The fact is, the scene is only a few minutes long and is shot mostly in shadows. You actually have to look real hard, but yes, they are really having sex. There is no way a guy who walks into a theater showing this film wearing a raincoat is going to be satisfied. As to whether the actors (Carole Laure and Lewis Furey) were being exploited, well, they did agree to perform in front of the camera, and it certainly wasn't for the money (the film was shot for $74,000). The fact that Furey and Laure were husband and wife at the time (I believe they still are, but I could be mistaken) should also be noted.
This is not to say that I think the sex had to be in there. Although I think the graphic nature of the scene is meant to fully illustrate the spiritual and sexual connection between the two characters, it could have easily been done without the "hard-core" shots. This may sound strange if you haven't seen the film, but the shots really are about as tasteful as you can get while still being graphic. The explicitness certainly does not ruin the film or distract from its power, but it certainly wasn't one hundred percent necessary. This being said, I still find the film to be truly beautiful and haunting. It's a pity some people can't get beyond a few minutes, and try to focus on all the other aspects that help make the film a work of art. Ironically, all the exploitation films that were coming out of Quebec just a few years earlier, while not ever containing hard-core sex, were much more about, and capitalized much more on, the baser aspects of sex than "L'ange et la femme" ever did.
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