This 'Angel' gets what she wants

Romola Garai and Michael Fassbender in a scene from ''Angel,'' a new film from director François Ozon.

What on earth is Fran??ois Ozon up to in "Angel"? The French filmmaker has playfully messed with moviegoers' heads in ways sultry ("Swimming Pool"), somber ("Under the Sand"), and swinging ("8 Women"), but this is the first time he's dived off the deep end of silly.

Ozon's first English-language effort - a 2007 drama getting a belated two-week release at the Museum of Fine Arts starting today - seems at first a purple period-film pastiche, with a melodramatic score that swoons as much as its heroine does. Yet there's wit and satire going on beneath the film's over-upholstered surface and a possible reading of the movie that renders it terribly sad.

"Angel" is Angel Deverell (Romola Garai), a schoolgirl in small-town Edwardian England who's ready to explode from the glamorous life of romance playing out in her head. She seethes with impatience at her grocer mother (Jacqueline Tong), scorns her teachers and schoolmates, and stays up late into the night writing dreadful dark-and-stormy novels about lost princesses. Truly, the girl is a pill.

And yet her books make it into print (Sam Neill is her doughty publisher; Ozon regular Charlotte Rampling plays his stiff-backed wife, horrified by Angel's gaucheness). Better (or worse), they're bestsellers, and Angel is launched on a stellar career in which the director indulges her tin-pot glory with tin-pot movie clich??s: corny montages of her books and costume changes, intentionally lousy rear-screen projection.

Over the years, Angel attracts followers: Lucy Russell walks a drolly thin line of repressed lesbian adoration as Angel's personal secretary. Angel also attracts men: A painter of drab ashcan realism (Michael Fassbender) becomes the love of her life before she smothers him with ego. The film traces its brilliantly shallow heroine from pre-Raphaelite youth to a middle age in which she resembles an Aubrey Beardsley nightmare - Norma Desmond ready for her rotogravure close-up.

Is the movie a put-on? A mistake? Neither - "Angel" is a deft parody of a certain kind of book written by a certain kind of pre-WWI lady artiste: endlessly self-dramatizing, voraciously self-absorbed. Garai ("Atonement") walks this narrow wavelength like a champion, creating an Angel who's exasperating, hateful, comic, and bizarrely heroic. The movie is based on a novel by the respected British authoress Elizabeth Taylor (not the actress) and it not only retains the book's tone of loving but pitiless irony but finds cinematic equivalents for Taylor's acid prose. (That said, there's cheap entertainment to be had by going to the Internet Movie Database and reading outraged user comments by moviegoers who completely missed the boat.)

On the face of it, Ozon has his little joke and eats it too, but there are hints of another, far more melancholy movie under the surface. All the overripe emotional tempests, the dialogue howlers, the pivots from one absurd development to the next - could this not be the fantasy of a shopkeeper's daughter pining for grown-up glamour? "Angel," it turns out, may not be a Fran??ois Ozon movie at all. Instead, he seems to have stepped aside to let Angel dream the life she'll never have.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/ movienation.