Angel and Sakuran

3:24pm Wednesday 27th August 2008

Two spirited women attempting to breach the conventions of their times dominate this week's minor releases. But neither François Ozon nor Mika Ninagawa wholly succeeds in making us warm to their unconventional heroines.

Adapted from a 1957 Elizabeth Taylor novel that was inspired by the life of Stratford's second greatest writer, Marie Corelli, Ozon's Angel suffers from the catastrophic miscasting of the titular lead. The harder poor old Romola Garai tries, the worse she gets as the small-town shopkeeper's daughter who takes Edwardian London by storm with her hilariously gauche penny dreadfuls. However, she's more than matched by Michael Fassbender and Lucy Russell, as the siblings who respectively become her treacherous artist husband and discreetly lesbian confidante and move into the garish country pile that Garai has coveted since childhood.

Not even devoted agent Sam Neill and his diffident wife Charlotte Rampling can raise the standard, as they seek to prevent the effusive scribe's reputation from being reduced to tatters by the Great War and changing literary tastes. The period trappings are admirable. But the dialogue is atrocious and its weaknesses are further exposed by the fact that it's delivered in a stagily declamatory style that would be much better suited to a mock-parodic pantomime.

Retaining a fierce independence within the confines of an 18th-century Yoshiwara brothel, Anna Tsuchiya suppresses her passions to achieve her ambitions in Mika Ninagawa's lavish adaptation of Moyoco Anno's acclaimed manga comic, Sakuran.

Determined to succeed oiran Yoshino Kimura, Tsuchiya exploits the bedroom tricks learned from kindly Miho Kanno in order to seduce powerful men like samurai Kippei Shiina, while keeping her truest love for the sensitive and considerate Hiroki Narimiya. However, her desire to seize her freedom rather than have it bought for her prompts a reckless act of cherry blossom rebellion.

Ninagawa's background in photography is readily evident in the sumptuous staging. But the imagery is often as static as an ukiyoe tableau and the anachronistic score soon becomes a major irritant. Nevertheless, Ninagawa avoids PC sermonising and the creaky fakeness of Rob Marshall's 2005 take on Arthur Golden's bestseller, Memoirs of a Geisha.

Inspired by the Starkweather-Fugate homicides, Terrence Malick's debut feature Badlands (1973) has widely been accepted as a modern classic. It will be interesting, therefore, to see if it stands up to criticial scrutiny during its month-long re-issue at BFI Southbank in London.

The performances of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, as the 25-year-old James Dean lookalike and the teenager who becomes his bemused partner in crime, are as outstanding as Tak Fujimoto's lensing of the sprawling mid-Western landscape. But the thesis that the killing spree and the public response to it are motivated by a mass moral alienation induced by the socio-cultural banality of 1950s America is less persuasive. So is Malick's attempt to deconstruct the conventions of the road movie by removing tangible psychological insights into the couple's deluded romanticism.

Indeed, by so emphasising the detachment of the characters, Malick forces the audience to spectate with Spacek-like passivity while suppressing uncomfortable feelings of superiority.