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Tuesday, October 20, 2009

BD impressions: Angel-A

1:57 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

Angel-A, Luc Besson's return to the director's chair after a seven-year hiatus, is certainly derivative. Highly reminiscent of a Parisian It's a Wonderful Life, it also has obvious parallels with another French film, Patrice Leconte's La fille sur le pont, with its monochromatic photography and story of a man at the end of his tether who is brought back from the brink when a mysterious woman enters his life. Both films also centre around an attempted suicide on a bridge overlooking the River Seine. Still, I'm willing to overlook its derivative nature for the simple reason that it is both very entertaining and genuinely heart-warming. Something about Besson's melding of European art-house and Hollywood mainstream ideas and aesthetics seems to allow him to get away with a grand amount of schmaltz and plain old silliness. Yeah, it's basically a story about an angel (the amazingly leggy Rie Rasmussen) sent down from the sky to teach a petty crook (the eternally scruffy Jamel Debbouze) to tell the truth, and as such is about as daft as it sounds, but it's done with such panache that I can't help loving it.

Image quality: The first thing that struck me about Angel-A's transfer was its noticeable purple tint. This also affected Optimum's 2007 DVD release, and I have a hard time believing that this was deliberate. (Of course, you can always dial your display's colour saturation down to "zero" to cancel it out.) The image is not particularly detailed on the whole, although it's not unpleasant to look at, while the near-absence of grain and the not entirely natural appearance of what little remains does lead me to suspect degraining, probably at the DI stage. I'm assuming this was the look Besson and long-term cinematographer Thierry Arbogast were going for, but it means that, while smooth and fairly easy on the eyes, it tends to look a little artificial and doesn't have that HD "pop" that many are so fond of. Needless to say, it's a worthy upgrade over the DVD, but perhaps not quite the revelation that some might have expected. 7/10

Angel-A
studio: Optimum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 19.3 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 30.63 Mbit/sec

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