Critic Reviews

An exquisite tale about coming of age and coming to terms.

A chewy, handsomely staged novel of a movie, Sorry Angel (whose much better French title translates to Pleasure, Love, and Run Fast) contains moments of piercing intelligence and heartbreaking beauty. It’s an epic diptych look at two lives converging, one in many ways just beginning, the other faltering to a close. I was absolutely in love with it—until the very end.

What's bracing about Sorry Angel is that it refuses to allow the specificity of its characters — specifically drawn and superbly played — to be obscured or flattened by the drama of terminal illness. Neither man is made nicer or more palatable than he has to be.

While it has visual energy to spare, the movie is more relaxed and less flamboyantly playful than most of Honore’s other films, unfolding with naturalistic grace — precise but unfussy framing, fluid camera movements — and fewer New Wave-y winks and nods.

It took a while for this digressive movie to get its hooks in me, but once it did, Sorry Angel didn’t let go.

Both sprawling and intimate, it tells a story dealing with life, love, friendship, mortality and, yes, AIDS, in a manner that is relentlessly and deliberately unsentimental in tone but which nevertheless proves to be quite affecting.

Honoré’s deliberately paced, willfully unsentimental character study is like the yin to the yang of last year’s Cannes Grand Prize winner, “BPM.” Whereas Robin Campillo’s ACT-UP drama argued that the personal was political, and did so with lightning-bolt urgency, Honoré’s film is a more subdued rumination on community and connection.

Sorry Angel doesn’t always make you feel the weight of its presence—but as any good romance should, it makes you feel the sting of its absence.

There are moments of joy and humor throughout, and the film insists on feeling those emotions, just as much as it does grief.

Though the film resists easy categorisation, it often tumbles along like queer screwball, which chimes with its original French title: Plaire, Aimer et Courir Vite, or Give Pleasure, Love and Run Fast. It’s a fine manifesto, and Honoré’s film excels at all three.