What a mess this is – and what a shame. Michael Winterbottom is a film-maker of such restless energy and productivity: he is genuinely interested in ideas. His new film is vaguely inspired by the Amanda Knox case: the American woman who, along with her then boyfriend, was convicted, acquitted, then reconvicted in absentia of murdering British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia in 2007, and now faces extradition back to Italy. Heart-sinkingly, The Face of an Angel turns out to be a movie about a movie, a process about a process, bogged down in a tedious muddle of relativism and indecision.
Winterbottom invents a patchy, dull, scrappily written drama about a film director (Daniel Brühl) in Siena to develop a fictional movie project about a similar case. Tormented by the breakdown of his marriage, he has a fling with a journalist (Kate Beckinsale) and a platonic, flirtation-lite with a beautiful student (Cara Delevingne). He decides that the question of guilt and innocence is less interesting than using Dante’s works as a model for turning his film into a meditation on beauty, purity and loss. It is shallow and glib, and Brühl’s fantasies and nightmares lead to some terrible tonal misjudgments and wrong notes. The bizarre stabbing-and-sex scene is unwatchable for the wrong reasons.
