(L to R) Pierre Delonchamps, Vincent Lacoste and Denis Podalydès in Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel
My review for the April 2019 issue of Sight & Sound of Sorry Angel, Christophe Honoré’s impressive feature about Parisian gay life in the 1990s. The film is released in the UK on 22 March 2019. Review posted with permission.
Midway through Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel, Arthur (Vincente Lacoste), a cocksure 22-year-old Breton, comes to Paris to see Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps), the more worldly 35-year-old writer he hooked up with when Jacques visited Arthur’s hometown of Rennes. It’s 1993 and Jacques is developing an AIDS-related illness and, scared and vain and sad, he gets his older friend and neighbour Mathieu (Denis Podalydès) to fob Arthur off with an excuse. Mathieu reports back that, while he’s in town, Arthur wants to visit the Pompidou Centre and attend a meeting of the grassroots AIDS activist group ACT UP. Jacques frets that Arthur might get hurt. “Hurt? At ACT UP?” Mathieu snaps back. “You wear me out, Jacques. It pisses me off. Go to ACT UP too and stop navel-gazing. Others are sick and fight back but you… God, you’re a pain.”
Arriving not long after Robin Campillo’s brilliant 120 BPM (read my review here), Sorry Angel – which episodically maps Jacques and Arthur’s burgeoning relationship within a small network of other intimate relationships – might seem to invite comparison with that other semi-autobiographical drama of 1990s Parisian gay life in the shadow of the virus. And this exchange in particular might give voice to frustrations some admirers of Campillo’s work – with its formal effervescence, radical structural critique and celebration of collective action – might feel at Honoré’s feature, with its calm, novelistic rhythms centred on the individual subjectivities of a couple of largely self-absorbed, even fatalistic characters.
There are, however, many stories to be told in many ways about the AIDS crisis, a trauma whose seismic effects on LGBTQ+ living have only begun to be calibrated or reckoned with. And, if Sorry Angel’s post-romantic sensibility feels less urgent, angry or passionate than 120 BPM, it nevertheless attends quietly but richly to the technologies – cultural, sexual, emotional – of intergenerational contact and communication that constitute the engines of a queer civics. Honoré also shares Campillo’s vivid engagement with Foucault’s understanding that the true challenge of queer living is less to do with forms of sex than with friendship as a way of life.
Neither main character could be described as wholly endearing. Occasionally referring to himself in the third person, Jacques is “a complicator” of relationships, as one friend puts it, prone to making things tricky in ways ranging from bitching about hotel rooms to dismissing others’ desires to putting a dying friend out on the street out of jealousy. Arthur, meanwhile, has a breezy assurance – and a lofty position among his student friends – seemingly out of step with his actual levels of experience, empathy or insight.
Yet both are also charming, clever and capable of generosity and consideration. Jacques cares deeply for his young son Louis (Tristan Farge), for instance, and Arthur brings joy to Jacques as his health fails. There’s convincing romantic chemistry between the two, though the sexual dimension of their relationship is somewhat coyly downplayed, as are the expressive capacities of sexual relations throughout the film. An intriguing exception is the early scene in which Arthur visits a cruising ground in Rennes whose choreography of glances and gestures, overtures rebuffed, tolerated or welcomed, is elegantly portrayed.
Indeed, Sorry Angel is fruitfully alive to the spectrum of intimation, hedging, deniability and pursuit underpinning many forms of queer relationality, from the tactful art of leaving messages on shared answerphones to the deeper ambivalences governing alternative kinds of entanglement and commitment. “Ellipticism I can do,” Arthur wryly notes at one point. It is this hard-won and fragile web of contingent belonging, as much as individual physical integrity, to which AIDS lays waste, its hideous disruptions undoing carefully nurtured forms of lineage and understanding as well as organs and faculties. It depletes the defences and immunities of cultures as well as bodies.
Lineage is especially important here, with chosen forms of family and inheritance taking the place of the normative models from which queers are often disqualified. In one compelling sequence, Jacques informs Arthur over the phone, with both condescension and tenderness, of the differences between such diverse objects of desire as the Maxim’s, the Vondel and the Wrong Blond, types derived from the gay dead white male pantheon of Isherwood and Auden, Whitman and Ginsberg. A relatively privileged lineage, sure, but a valid and valuable one nonetheless. “Are you taking notes?” Jacques asks. Arthur is and, in a rare expressionistic flourish, the two men are suddenly not in different parts of the country but together, in the same room, entwined.
Like Honoré’s, Arthur’s father died when he was 15, literalising the trope of the unavailable father that runs through many aspects of gay culture. Arthur says he kept hoping for years that his father would rise again and find and save him “but he stayed dead”. There’s a savagery, then, to the similarly abbreviated span of his new mentor, Jacques; and a savagery to the way Jacques himself cuts off an attempt by his dying ex, Marco (Thomas Gonzalez), to say something memorable or moving to Louis on their last meeting, to defy time just a little. “Spare us,” Jacques snaps, his cruelty multiplied by the irony of his chosen words in a time of decimation.
Louis’s character embodies the capacity of queer lives to combine chosen and biogenetic kin in novel ways: he is the child not of a love match but of the friendship between Jacques and Isabelle (Sophie Latourneur), and he is happily exposed to his father’s unconventional relationships and, less happily, to his caprices and ire. The camera lingers heartbreakingly on the boy as Jacques picks a fight with Marco: he holds his book vacantly for a while, then we follow him to another room where he picks up some knitting and sits by a window. There’s tenderness too in Arthur’s work with children at a summer camp. It’s notable in this context that Sorry Angel forms part of a triptych by Honoré in which such concerns are explored from various angles: the book Ton père engages with the experience of being a gay father while the stage play Les idoles reanimates Honoré’s cultural forebears, including Jacques Demy and Serge Daney, lost to AIDS.
At its most moving and powerful, Sorry Angel is about friendship and central in this regard are Mathieu and his layered and tremendously affecting realisation by Podalydès. Balding and moustachioed, glasses perched halfway down his nose, he appears at first as a faintly prim or schlubby foil to Jacques’s narcissistic goings-on, offering pragmatic advice he knows won’t be taken and being awkwardly interrupted while entertaining a sex worker. There’s more going on during the night in that he spends drinking, dancing and pontificating with Jacques and Arthur, alternating between gamely tolerating the latter for the former’s sake, genuinely having fun and being treated shabbily.
In the film’s climactic exchange, Deladonchamps conjures the charismatic verve of the wounded egotist on the brink of his final close-up but it’s Podalydès, as the designated mourner, who conveys the scale of the pain of such moments. Not mere tragedies of the self, they demand a grief that is relational and expansive, spinning outward through unjust constellations of constrained and bitter agency and incalculable, irredeemable loss, not just of individuals but of whole ways of being together in the world differently. Arthur, meanwhile, sits and waits for a call that will not come, his wounded pride a temporary balm against what will eventually arrive: news of a rupture that will test his bravado and never really be repaired. Maybe he’ll make it to an ACT UP meeting. Maybe he’ll make films.
