Angel-A

Angel-A

I nearly forgot to write this review. “Angel-A” screened for critics on a Friday morning and by Monday I had forgotten I’d seen it. Luckily, I took notes. You don’t have to. If you’ve got 91 minutes to kill, you can watch “Angel-A” and save yourself the trouble.

To call a lightweight French romantic comedy like “Angel-A” forgettable is not a put-down exactly it’s more of an observation. The film doesn’t really aim to be much beyond a breezy pastiche that tickles your memory of other, better movies. In this case, that means a riff on “Wings of Desire,” “Splash” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” with fleeting, gratuitous nods to “Forrest Gump” and “Pulp Fiction” thrown in for reasons you’re probably not supposed to dwell on too long.

As the title suggests, “Angel-A” is an angel-out-of-water movie photographed in black-and-white because it’s set in Paris. Paris is a city of muted daytime colors; even its sunlight has gray in it, an effect beautifully captured by cinematographer Thierry Arbogast in a cruise down the Seine that feels more like Paris than Paris sometimes does, as if movies could bottle places up like scents. The film does feature one indelible image: A winged creature hovers overhead above the river, and its beauty comes mostly from its being in back and white; color would have made it too literal, if you can use that word about an image.

The central character of “Angel-A” is Paris itself, but the movie also stars Andre (popular French comic actor Jamel Debbouze), a scruffy little Moroccan guy with perpetual stubble who was in both “Amelie” and “Days of Glory,” and Angela (Danish model Rie Rasmussen), a tall blond drink of water who starred in “Femme Fatale.” Andre has a gambling problem the booze and drugs addiction of the ’00s and is about to throw himself off a smallish bridge into the Seine when he notices that the not so angelic skinny platinum Amazon is about to do the same thing, only higher up. They argue, he saves her (or she saves him) and they make it their business to cure each other’s character defects and self-esteem issues. And his money problems.

She’s Mutt (5-10, fair, gangly), he’s Jeff (5-5, dark, intense). She doesn’t know who she is; he doesn’t like who he is. Their character arcs intersect. Boy meets girl; boy alienates girl; boy gets (or grabs) girl. The End.

Although Luc Besson (“Le Dernier Combat,” “The Big Blue,” “The Fifth Element”) hasn’t directed a film since the ill-fated 1999 Joan of Arc spectacular “The Messenger,” he remains an unstoppable one-man movie factory: In terms of producer or executive-producer credits over the past decade or so, Besson has probably matched if not exceeded his American counterpart Jerry Bruckheimer (whose first credit was on 1972’s “The Culpepper Cattle Co.”).

Besson’s movies are like Bruckheimer’s on bath salts: They’re greasy, overinflated, and empty inside; they make a lot of noise when they explode. They’re also disposable like popcorn and soda pop, or a Big Gulp full of caffeinated corn syrup passing right through you without leaving much behind except maybe a mild stomachache. And that’s okay. But was the $10 Diet Coke really worth it?

Then again, maybe you’d rather not have the memory of having had this experience at all. In which case, drink up.

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