This week I've watched adaptations of Victorian-set novels. The first, Fingersmith, was based on a lesbian faux-Victorian romance and a BBC follow-up to the same author's Tipping the Velvet. Just before the end of the first half, after I'd written it off as soft-core lesbian porn, there was a surprise twist that made me reconsider my assessment and made me curious to see where it was going. Well, it went to a lot of betrayals, murder, sacrifice, and too many collisions of circumstance. The cast was great, but I thought the race to the end glossed over much of the storytelling.
Then I watched Angel, starring Romola Garai, and I still have no idea what exactly the point if the film was. The leading character is a rather obnoxious, rather stupid, egomaniacal writer of popular fiction of little literary merit who appears to live in a fantasy world, and the director seems to have filmed it as a comic opera cotton candy, spun-sugar piece of fluff. The music kept saying "isn't this funny and romantic?" as the plot became darker and her fantasy world destroyed her. I find Garai irritating here much as she was in the BBC adaptation of Emma: At times her reactions seem far too contemporary for the period, although I liked her very much in the Ian MacKellan King Lear.
The other irritating fact was that the film covers Angel's life from around 19800-1920, yet I never felt the fashions changed with the times. I did like Sam Neil and Charlotte Rampling as her publisher and his wife.