Angel

François Ozon is the French director who made the masterly 5x2, and his career has had such fluency and adventure that anything he makes is of some interest. But this really is a failure - an honourable failure, arguably, but a failure, and a pretty complete one at that. It is his first English-language film, an attempted adaptation of Elizabeth Taylor's neglected seriocomic novel Angel, published in 1957. It is the story of Angelica "Angel" Deverell, an absurd romantic novelist of the Edwardian era; she churns out bestselling pulp, and her talent for crass commercial fiction fascinatingly co-exists with a genius for manipulating those around her, and for remaining serenely conceited and unaware of the absurd figure she cuts. Romola Garai plays Angel; Sam Neill is her long-suffering publisher Theo Gilbright and Charlotte Rampling is Theo's wife Hermione; Lucy Russell is Nora, Angel's companion, and Michael Fassbender plays Esmé, Nora's brother and Angel's ne'er-do-well husband. It is certainly an outstanding cast.

Catastrophically, Ozon gets the book wrong from the outset. He treats the whole thing like a sendup: a spoof, a hoax. The overacting and the obvious back-projections tip us the wink: it's all camp and ironic, tacitly importing our assumed disdain for the melodramatic absurdities of Angel's life and work into the fabric of the movie itself. But this generic self-awareness is facetious and supercilious, and overlooks the sweetness and depth of Taylor's book. And as British Rail stalls its trains with the wrong sort of snow, Ozon stalls his movie with the wrong sort of irony. He perpetually refers to Hollywood dramas of the Douglas Sirk variety, with big orchestral scores and staircase scenes: but their Americanness is entirely wrong for this English tale. (I suspect, moreover, that he is impersonating not Sirk, but Todd Haynes's homage to Sirk in his Far from Heaven, which worked because it was passionate and heartfelt.)

It would have been far more interesting to pastiche an English genre: such as Michael Powell's Black Narcissus, with Lucy Russell as a latter-day Kathleen Byron. I have written elsewhere about how the Ealing studio, in its heyday, might have made a brilliant version of the book - not dissimilar from, say, Kind Hearts and Coronets, whose hero rather resembles Angel.

Ozon has certainly engaged with the text in other ways: it is very strange that Angel's husband and her companion-cum-amanuensis are brother and sister, and Ozon is right to want to amplify and clarify how dysfunctional and plain weird that is. But his insistence on a bisexual dimension is unsubtle. And he insists on tying up a plot strand that Taylor had deliberately left untied. Garai's performance isn't bad, if shrill - although Ozon's direction doesn't give her much of a chance to get under the character's skin - but like everyone else's it is marooned in the fundamental wrongness of Ozon's approach. Opportunities don't get more lost than this.