Recensioni de* critic*

It rarely plays like a film about churning, ungovernable life. It is instead a precious, inert gloss on lifestyle.

It took a while for this digressive movie to get its hooks in me, but once it did, “Sorry Angel” didn’t let go. A big part of it is Jacques, who in Deladonchamps’s hands is one of the most layered film characters I’ve experienced in some time.

Honoré largely adheres to a restraind visual palette here, mirroring his evenhanded vision of queer kinship. Humor, sex, love beyond the bounds of normalcy—all are warmly located in Jacques and Arthur’s time together.

Sorry Angel, by design, chronicles a decade of death and uncertainty yet is more driven by the emotional specificity of queer love, laying bare its conundrums without any pretensions to “universalization.”

The image that adorns the film’s poster—of three generations of gay men sharing a single bed—is a crucial one. But the film's essence is contained in what follows: that is, in its observation of one generation slipping away (“We’ll be nothing,” says Jacques at one point), so that the next may have its turn at a hard-won existence; of sorrow blossoming into fulsome, gossamer joy.

This uneasy stylistic blend lends a disjointed quality to the film that prevents it from fully coming alive as we lurch from incident to incident. As a result, the main relationship between Jacques and Arthur feels curiously inert. In some ways, I’m happy to see Honoré trying to move out of his comfort zone and expand his palette. But it’s also hard not to feel like something has been lost.

A film that not only perfectly encapsulates the Honoré identity – at least in his realist mode – but is his most satisfying achievement in arthouse mainstream terms. . . . It’s often considered a bad thing for a film to come across as novelistic, as if that meant that it weren’t cinematic, but Sorry Angel is certainly that, and deeply involving on every level.

This part of the film works hard to skirt the kind of maudlin clichés of what’s become its own genre, and largely succeeds through Honoré’s idiosyncratic approach to loss, grief, and acceptance.