ROMANTIC DRAMA; 1hr 27min (French with subtitles)
STARRING: Clotilde Hesme, Grégory Gadebois
Fisherman’s friend: Hesme
Meeting someone through personal adverts is like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. When Normandy fisherman Tony (Gadebois) answers an ad placed by hard-case Angèle (Clotilde Hesme), he’s looking for someone to be with while she — on parole, out of work and separated from her nine-year-old son (Antoine Couleau) — seems solely out for sex. They’re nothing alike in other ways, as well. Tony is serious, decent and focused while Angèle, who has closed herself off, uses life as it has used her and essentially lives for her boy.
Although he doubts her sincerity, Tony puts Angèle to work in the family business and moves her in with him and his suspicious mother (Evelyne Didi). Reserved folk of few, terse phrases, the bond that grows between the two of them is played down all the way, but the emotion is there in every look they give each other. As a love story, Angèle & Tony is a bewitching 101 in understatement from writer-director Alix Delaporte: Hesme and Gadebois make you care through the force of their feelings without needing to put them into words.
