Ernst Lubitsch
Angelo

This is the second encounter between Ernst Lubitsch and the diva Marlene, after their "indirect" encounter (him only as producer) that happened the same year with Frank Borzage's "Desire". Dietrich's presence is fundamental and irreplaceable: she moves in the film - and fills it with herself - like a kind of enigmatic deity, emphasizing with her own inscrutable personality the elliptical structure of a film that is equally cold and mysterious.

Based on a story by Melchior Lengyel (one of the many Hungarian playwrights who supplied raw material to the comedies of the thirties) and a screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, "Angel" is the story of a romantic-sexual triangle as it could be conceived in the Hollywood of the Hays Code. Indeed, only in a context of sexophobic repression could such a cinema, so deeply marked by reticence, be born and thrive: and only a director like Lubitsch could transform the insinuating climate of censorship not only into a strength but even into the absolute linchpin of his comedies.

The three sides of the triangle are the English diplomat Sir Frederick Barker, the young American Anthony Halton, and of course the beautiful and neglected Lady Barker. The encounter between Anthony and the woman should have been a one-night meeting - they met in Paris by mistake, she didn't even tell him her name, and he nicknamed her Angel - but then the two lovers meet again, in front of her husband. Lady Barker will have to make a decision, and she won't have any doubts: she will choose to stay by her husband's side, who has always loved her and immediately forgave her betrayal.

"Lubitsch is like a Swiss cheese where every hole is genius," brilliantly stated Truffaut, and "Angel" is the punctual demonstration. From the beginning to the end, the film does not say and does not show, deliberately omitting backstories, transitions, and key situations, leaving it to the audience's imagination to fill the gaps. We know nothing about the mysterious past of Lady Barker, of which we only grasp something through the initial conversation with the ambiguous Russian grand duchess. We know nothing about what really happens on the evening of the Paris meeting, while the camera tracks along the facade of the "tea room" (actually a luxury brothel), allowing us to glimpse just a little through the drawn curtains of the windows.

The geometry of the plot - the film is framed by a Parisian prologue and epilogue - and the dynamics between characters - obviously triangular - coexist with a subtle and insinuating use of off-screen. Ellipses, reticences, and veiled allusions punctuate the unfolding of a film "intangible and abstract" (words of Guido Fink), where the dialogues are as long and recurring as they are full of innuendo, and the real intentions of the characters remain most often unexpressed. To this "rigorous and reticent geometry" (always Fink) well fit the soft and luminous tones of Charles Lang's beautiful photography.

Speaking of ellipses, one cannot but mention the scene of the dinner for three at the Barker house, strictly kept off-screen but about which we learn everything thanks to the comments of cooks and waiters (the lady hasn't touched the steak, the guest has chopped it up without tasting it, the clueless husband has eaten everything instead): an extraordinary compendium of the never too celebrated Lubitsch touch, a textbook correspondence between food and sex, and above all one of the funniest moments of a film where the purely comedic parts are reduced to a minimum and entrusted to the supporting actors.

The overall atmosphere, of a soft and imperceptible melancholy, makes "Angel" one of Lubitsch's most peculiar works but also one of the most unforgettable, as unforgettable as Marlene Dietrich's character. We are talking about cinema and characters obviously of another time: but whose charm, for those who know how to grasp it, survives unchanged even today.