Angel (15)

The French director François Ozon has taken Elizabeth Taylor's beadily satiric novel and transformed it into a droll and somewhat disturbing fantasia on the creative temperament.

"She had never much cared for books, because they did not seem to be about her, and she thought that she would rather write a book herself, to a pattern of her own choosing." Thus Angelica Deverell, an extraordinarily conceited and headstrong young miss of the Edwardian era, writes a story as florid and sumptuous as her own origins are humble and workaday. Angel (Romola Garai) lives above her mother's grocery shop in Norley, a drab brewery town which she longs to escape.

With a blithe self-confidence belying her 15 years, Deverell offers the manuscript of her novel, The Lady Irania, to London publisher Théo Gilbright (Sam Neill) who, half-appalled, half-fascinated, decides it might be a success, despite its author's own indifference to reading and literature.

"I quite like Shakespeare," she admits, "except when he tries to be funny." Gilbright's faith is repaid, the book becomes a best-seller, and Angel embraces a world of public acclaim and spectacular opulence she has long thought her due.

Ozon has previously investigated the fertile territory of a novelist and her imagination in his 2003 film Swimming Pool, wherein a British crime writer (Charlotte Rampling) tries to work through a creative block while sojourning at her publisher's holiday chateau.

This time, however, the distortions of reality are even more ambiguous, and, for a while, we feel unsure as to whether we are being shown a portrait of ecstatic self-delusion or merely a sly glimpse into a grotesque mismatch between talent and success. How can a writer who spangles her prose with words like "coruscating" and "iridescent" command such a huge readership? What's beyond doubt is just how wittily it plays, at least for the first three quarters of an hour. Garai has exactly the right spoilt set to her mouth for this precocious fantasist, and her large eyes widen with humourless affront at anyone who dares question Angel's imaginative despotism.

Her first meeting with Neill's gently coaxing publisher is superb: when he suggests a few changes to her manuscript – a bottle of champagne, he points out, would not require a corkscrew – she fiercely rejects any kind of intervention. Later, her conduct at dinner with Neill and his wife (Charlotte Rampling, again) is so obnoxious and self-regarding you begin to think she really must be a writer.

The film's look also bamboozles us with its seamless switching between reality and artifice. Crude back-projections of London landmarks announce Angel's arrival in town, and the extravagant country mansion, Paradise House, she buys for herself is upholstered in the vivid, heated colours of a stage set, a cross between a Douglas Sirk melodrama and an MGM musical. One begins to wonder if this glamorous social whirl is simply happening inside Angel's head. Yet the attachments she forms with Nora (Lucy Russell – brilliant), an adoring fan-turned-secretary, and Nora's brother, a saturnine-looking artist named Esmé (Michael Fassbender), keep tugging the film back towards realism. Esmé's bleak, dark-hued paintings of cemeteries and tenements are the opposite of her own wildly romantic fiction, while the man himself proves a scoundrel and a waster. But Angel falls for him all the same.

So how vexing that the film's sprightly satire comes to so little, and that the truth of Angel's life is left so elusive. Ozon poses the question beautifully, yet his refusal to offer an answer seems not so much a mystery as a cop-out. If there is a pathological strain in Angel's longing for the picture-perfect in everything, then the film ought to show the mask slipping. If, on the other hand, her life unfolds in just the way it has been presented, then – so what? The sight of the older Angel, chalky of face and wild of hair, is perhaps intended to be tragic, yet all you're left to wonder is why she looks like one of the Addams family. It's a great disappointment, though it's fun for a while.

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