SPOILERS Ahead ** Having lost many friends to hiv/aids, this one made me tear up. Not sure exactly what the author's main message was, but I sure sympathized with several of the themes contained here... There's the harshness and cruelty of the early years of aids; the older, younger relationship; bad timing; loss of loved ones; people at different stages of coming out; Having a son, and the son's mother (or who-ever) still in one's life. A lot going on in this film, but it all flows smoothly. Our main character Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a writer who has aids. He has an agreement with his ex-partner that when things get really bad, they don't want to linger. Jacques meets Arthur (Vincent Lacoste) a much younger dude, and they start spending time together. Many of their discussions (and the whole film overall) include talk of various famous writers. At one point, Arthur goes to visit the graves of several writers in Paris. As Jacques' health gets progressively worse, Arthur wants to be with him, but is rebuffed. With the meds available now, things are SO much better, so this is clearly a period piece, from a darker time. A cute moment when Arthur meets the son's mother, and she says "Is this the first you've heard of us?" The part of the film that resonated with me was just missed connections... bad timing of relationships; when one person is so much more in love than the other, or unable to return the time and love, for whatever reason. mixed emotions. we've all experienced one or more of these life experiences, so this would be a good film for anyone to watch. Well done. At the very end, Jacques says he hopes his son can forgive him. but we're not sure exactly what for. Sweet. Written and directed by Christophe Honoré... i've seen earlier works of his, and quite enjoyed them. Recommended!
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ksf-215 July 2019
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Sebastien0226 May 2018I have mixed feelings about this movie. It's not bad, but it's not awesome either. Some other gay films, such as « Call me by your name » and « Beats per minute », moved me more than this one. Moreover, this love affair sounds a bit unrealistic, given the circumstances (disease, distance and age gap). Fortunately, there are nice moments of tenderness (the reunion in Paris), emotion (the last scene) and humor (Denis Podalydès' choreography or Vincent Lacoste's striptease). The soundtrack features some good music, such as the delicate song « Les gens qui doutent ».
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jromanbaker29 November 2018To Please, to Love, and to Run Quickly is nowhere near the sentimental use of the word sorry, and who is the angel? I also dislike the three in a bed image used on the poster as it bears little resemblance to the content of the film. I will give no spoilers, but I did not see one sexual threesome. and to be honest the sexuality in the film was coy and of the 'hide the penis at all costs' school. For those who have read my reviews please see the one on 'Theo and Hugo'.
I have awarded this film 7/10 because I thought it was a good film but not as good as it could have been. The dialogue in French is brutally difficult to follow as there is a lot of slurping over words and saying things in a way that you can only truly follow if you are in the same room with the people speaking, and then .... I found the characters drab, and the bisexual Breton tiresome.
And now for a major criticism about films set in the past about Aids. Where were the films during that period of the crisis? This retro look back makes me angry. Film makers should have had the courage back then to deal with this period in our history. Films like 'Theo and Hugo' are masterful as they deal with the situation now and are up to date. One reviewer here summed this up for me. He or she says, love-and romanticism-in the days of AIDS. In the days of? This is not a past thing. The days are now. Homosexuality and HIV are now. And yes as a friend of mine said, they need to know how it was, but frankly with a still on-going crisis we need to know how it IS.
One good element of this film is that it shows a child in a homosexual household in a positive way, and despite my slight boredom with the relationships, it is at least about an important issue. French film is waking up to homosexuality thanks to a list of good directors, and the dark negativity of the Nouvelle Vague, where love was strictly heterosexual, has slipped back into the waters from where it came. The Nouvelle Vague liberated image, but was feeble on diversity and dodgy on politics. Honore is a great director, but I am still waiting for his great film. -
bob9981 April 2022Christophe Honore is a director who has never interested me much; Dans Paris was a bore, and most of his features haven't played in North America. He has talent, but not a narrative sense. His actors carry the movie along, but even they can't do anything about the last 30 minutes, which are a total waste of time.
Setting the story in 1993, with ACT-UP just starting in France, we are fed disjointed scenes with characters who drift in and out of the action. Pierre Deladonchamps is convincing as Jacques, and Denys Podalydes has some cynical and funny scenes. I'd really like to try Chouchen, the Breton liqueur. -
Kirpianuscus19 October 2019Maybe, the fundamental virtue of film is to demonstrate nothing. It is only a story about relationship, about choices, love, life, happiness and fall. Not for impress, not for be manifesto, it seems more a sort of confession to the viewer, exploration of pieces of life, delicate confesions and easy portraits of the imposibility to be the expected one by the other and invitation to discover, from other perspective, the life. No doubts, a beautiful film but, unfortunatelly, not the most convincing. But nice.
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grigoraaakis-889-29591811 December 2023Two men fall in love with the idea of the other during the AIDS crisis and all hell breaks loose. Of course this is a storyline we've seen so many times in cinemas, but the truth is the approach in this one is very romantic and unique. The end result is sadly something I was expecting and of course not as powerful as it should have been. The main theme is not the AIDS pandemic but rather the way two people can fall in love so unexpectedly even if their lives are set in different directions. The movie drags a lot, is really slow-paced at times and the main protagonists are not always in focus thus never showcasing their chemistry. This could have been a different movie but sadly it almost feels unfinished or not fully realised.
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veronicalanderson-3700531 July 2019The characters felt real. I could connect with and care about them. At first, I thought it would be love conquers all but the path to love isn't always a pleasant one and still ita may not lead to happily ever after. That last part of the movie struck me on a level I can't yet explain. As I said, I loved the movie and even hours after watching, I'll still thinking of the characters.
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willeasyer5 October 2018This movie really made me feel great and calm, it's cute beautiful and heart-wrenching. first, the direction, Aesthetic, and production are very elegant it feels nostalgic and greeting and the non-linear, original way the story is told is very captivating. a charming story about two totally different men and their not so love at first sight romance. a perfect portrayal of gay men lives in the french 90, clandestine sex, aids, and loneliness tackled with a warming and funny manner it's truly the kind of movie that puts butterflies in your stomach, the production, the direction the story and the acting everything is top. it's very touching, funny, heartbreaking and it made me miss Paris & want to go there. I had a wonderful time this film made me want to live again; to explore and love; the romance between Jacques and Arthur as unconventional as it is was pleasing plus Pierre Deladonchamps was very touching and faultless in his role. one of the best movies I saw this year
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MOscarbradley30 November 2020Fundamentally ordinary yet incredibly self-centered, the characters in Christophe Honore's "Sorry, Angel" are not easy people to like. They are mostly a group of gay and bisexual men with complicated lives who find that relationships aren't necessarily what they're good at; even having a job, earning a living or just being 'themselves' also seem to pose a problem. The two main characters are Jacques, a writer in his thirties, (Pierre Deladonchamps), and Arthur, (Vincent Lacoste), a younger student, who meet, have sex and then go about the business of falling in love but find 'happy ever after' something of a pipedream.
It's territory Honore has explored before and more explicitly but this well-crafted, if overtly cool, movie represents something of a step forward if only in terms of style. This is a more formal, less kinetic, Honore but one still unable to shake off that sense of ennui. The performances are excellent but the characters aren't engaging. Also setting it at a time when AIDS was more prevalent than it is now seems like an unnecessary plot device rather than an attempt to get us to understand or care more about the people we see. Throw in a girlfriend and Jacques' young son and you get the impression that Honore is going out of his way to be 'cool' as if making a gay epic but one without a centre. Add a load of references to cinema and literature and you know exactly who this is aimed at. One for the fans, i'm afraid. -
alanh2000423 October 2018The person who saw Sorry Angel with me initially mislabeled it as another gay-AIDS-relationship movie, missing the point: It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. Christophe Honore never lacks ideas, and--to his good fortune--he does what he pleases. He takes risks and successfully avoids cliches; Honore is one of the world's brightest, funniest, savvy auteurs...His movies are earmarked by nostalgic romanticism, but they never wallow in the past because he is able to pay tribute without imitation, a technique that evades so many of his contemporaries.
Sorry Angel is about relationships. You do not need to be gay to watch it, but you need to understand humanity and compassion. Honore gets to the meat without chewing on the fat while his poignant dialogue is relatable to everyone eventually. The context of the movie (the 90's AIDS epidemic) is a setting for the text (based on the director's university years and his gay idols, writers and directors who died from the disease) but it is the subtext, Honore's observations about relationships--discerning, unsentimental, realistic portrayals of humans both gay and straight--which elevates the movie to the forefront of cinematic reflections. Where Robin Campillo's recent BPM (another stunner) focuses on activism, Honore shows us sympathy and love during an era of uncertainty and chaos.
Jonathan Romney notes that Sorry Angel is a "novelistic film" because it presents itself like great literature. The plot might be purposefully transparent, but the devil is in the details. -
robfwalter7 April 2019If films were permitted by law to be at most one hour long, this would be a beautiful and poignant glimpse of gay love in the early 90s. However, due to an unfortunate oversight Sorry Angel was allowed to carry on for two hours and twelve minutes. As a result I went from thinking "this is exquisite" to being unable to sit still because I was so bored.
Jacques is a Parisian writer who meets a pretentious and bookish young man in Rennes, a city in Britanny. Neither suspends their other sexual activities, but they haunt each other's thoughts and I found the tension of how the relationship would unfold to be compelling and engaging. The trouble is that the film just keeps going and the story is progressively weaker, so as the film goes on it's harder to care. Although geography is important to the plot, it's hard to tell if any scene is taking place in Paris or Rennes (or Amsterdam?). Additional characters appear and disappear, or die, or don't. There are stylistic flourishes that distract from the story and the dialogue is so stilted as to be comical at times.
Who knows what this film could be if it had been edited to a hundred minutes at most? The extra 42 minutes felt like torture to me. -
scottinhawaii-113 August 2019The world has changed a lot since the French New Wave. Audiences have shorter attention spans and don't seem to enjoy literary films as much. I gage if a film is too long by whether I look at my watch in a cinema or pause a streaming one at home to see how mich is left. I did neither on this film.
I was pulled into this film's world. It's yet another film that reminds me that I love the French cinema. This witty, complex, sexy, dramatic, funny, intelligent, literary, romantic, completely honest portrait of gay life in 1993, captured nuances of gay life not seen in American film. The acting is terrific. -
Pasky744 September 2018It could be only the story of Arthur, a young gay (bisexual?) student who, in the early 90s, arrives in Paris to find the one he loves. It could be almost a cliché, which actually find its place in Christophe Honoré's film, but it arrives only later in the film, at a time when everything is already almost lost. Because Jacques, the writer Arthur met in Rennes (a provincial town about 400 km in the west of Paris), is fatally ill. He knows his death is near and he tries to hide it from his lover, above all to avoid subjecting him to his decay. He hides in his neighbor's apartment, but when he sees his lover wandering sadly in the streets of Paris, he cannot resist. He finds him, hugs him, and abandons himself. One could compare this film to Robin Campillo's "BPM (Beats Per Minute)", which was also set in Paris in the 90s, but it hasn't much to do with it. Even if we feel the same distress in Christophe Honoré's film, this one is more of a romantic chronicle of 'Love in the days of AIDS'. We find some remains of 'Love Song' - the film/musical that made Honoré famous -, but without the affectation of that film. What he films today has much more gravity, and melancholy. Actor Pierre Deladonchamps (Jacques), who was also in Alain Guiraudie's fantastic 'Stranger by the Lake' and in André Téchiné's 'Golden Years', is amazing. He manages to express so much, with his face, the way he walks, speaks... He makes this character more human, asking questions as: how do you survive when you have almost no time left to live? This 'darker' film also has some 'light' moments, and some quite funny: when he comes out of a theater in Rennes, late at night, Jacques would like to meet Arthur, who follows them secretly, but he first has to listen to the horrible chatter of an actress with an inflated ego. The film is sometimes a bit lengthy, but Christophe Honoré has grasped here very well the hesitations of love, the certainty of the ephemeral and the intriguing osmosis between the sweetness of sex and its crudity.
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jb-x9 June 2019Although I enjoyed the overall plot, emotion behind it and the acting, the film lasted too long and there was not enough substance to keep me gripped the whole way through. I kept thinking to myself throughout the film that I have seen this all before (120 Battements par Minute, Call Me By Your Name etc.) and unfortunately, there was little which separated this film from LGBT films of this genre and this plot to make it a front runner.
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Moving. Covering the moments of death and enthusiasm, and discarding the temptations of flattery and rationality, under the practice of character collage and easy to find the overlapping surface of the painting, the most interesting and charming is the presence of several different spaces. The offensive temperament conversation is clear but cold.
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Alexanders-219 August 2022I admit, French films are usually boring for me, talky and not necessarily a source of great pleasure in terms of acting either. I was correspondingly sceptical when I stumbled across this film and unfortunately I was not taught any better. The dialogues are artificial and unbelievable, every sentence contains wisdom, instruction, earthiness. Nothing comes easily in this story that wants to be more significant than it is. I couldn't warm up to the actors and their characters, a feat, because nothing seemed realistically captured to me. That alone would not be a reason for failure, but the pace is very slow, there is non-stop talking, hardly anything happens for long stretches and when it does, it is contrived. Seen in this light, Sorry Angel remains a thesis paper about the times when AIDS was a death sentence and lacks any soul.
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Acting is good. This is what I kept repeating during all the movie, as I was bored, and noticing big anachronisms in nearly any scenes. Music choice anachronisms, dialogues anachronisms, and in general, the whole atmosphere is not 1993. I was 25 that year and, I am gay, so believe me, no, not 1993. If you're not sure about this, just pick and watch again any movie made at that time (J'embrasse pas (1991)) or movies that do revive very well that era (120 battements par minute (2017)). "Pump the volume" in 93 ? No way, heard it too many times since 88. The vocabulary and expression of the young doctor, 30 years ago ? No, way.
If I had not seen Pierre Deladonchamps in L'inconnu du lac (2013) (somewhat boring too), I would even say that it's another fake gay movie made by straights. Not one character was interesting. I lost friends at each of these years, not one character was close to any one of them (unlike in 120 BPM).
The plot is so, so, common and repeated in too many movies to keep my attention. How many times did I see the strip tease scene for a friend having AIDS at the hospital room or elsewhere, 4 times ? 5 times ? : The Trip (2002) was the first and then so many others... Plus, it's funny in a movie but completely strange/distasteful in a real situation.
If I had watch it alone, I think I would have fast-forwarded several times. Forget it. -
gazferg3 August 2018I saw Sorry Angel at the 2018 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). The first part of the movie is disjointed and one has to persevere before it starts to come together. Set in 1993, during the HIV/AIDS era in France, the story revolves around Jacques Tondelli, played by Pierre Deladonchamps, and his varied and many relationships and sexual liaisons. He's not a very likeable character and I found him somewhat stereotypically gay. Of course there's more complexity to the story than this but overall I found it tedious and overstated. Others might have a greater appreciation for the artistry of the movie however I left 30 minutes before the movie ended.
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adamjohns-4257524 March 2021I'm a fan of Pierre Deladonchamps and have been since seeing all of his glory in "Stranger By The Lake". He has something that is the epitome of the sexy French man and it's hard not to be drawn to him. It was a shame then that I was so disappointed and even a bit bored watching this film.
I don't think it really had much of a story, it was certainly hard to follow and as with so many things these days, I found it lacking in the supposed romance. There was however a lot of lust and sleeping around, drugs and all the other things that get attached to gay storylines.
The history of the AIDS crisis is very important and perhaps, with all of the other films out there, this one tried not to focus too much on that element in an attempt to make something different. In that case though, why make it about that at all? He could quite easily have just been depressed or had cancer.
As with most foreign cinema that I watch I did find that it was beautifully, carefully and thoughtfully filmed and produced, but I honestly did get bored and was frustrated that I couldn't speak French, because it meant that I couldn't play on my phone whilst waiting for the end to come. It may be that, once again, not knowing the language has put a barrier up that prevents me from enjoying the story. If I could hear the exact words and the inflections I might be wowed by the performance, but sadly in this case I just didn't get it.
I think that there are better films out there that cover the same story without it being as muddy, but Pierre is still very beautiful.