The Face of an Angel

The Face of an Angel (15)

UK/Italy/Spain 101 mins  Dir: Michael Winterbottom  Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Cara Delevingne, Daniel Brühl, Rosie Fellner, Genevieve Gaunt, Sai Bennett

Ah, good old-fashioned British hypocrisy. When the BBC reports disapprovingly on the journalistic scrum surrounding a sensational story, it invariably films the hordes of other camera crews from the vantage point of the moral high ground, loftily setting itself above the rest of the media. And when the liberal press covers the same events, it frequently uses a similar distancing device, pouring disdain upon tabloid coverage while finding it regrettably necessary to spare their readers none of the salacious details. So to Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel – a lightly fictionalised version of the Amanda Knox/Meredith Kercher murder case from the perspective of a sensitive filmmaker who’s suitably aghast at red-top scummery. So we get to see the bloody murder scene and hear plenty of speculation about the crime, but it’s all dressed up in a lot of Dante-quoting meta-guff to reassure high-minded arthouse audiences that they’re not watching a lurid exploitation flick. “Back of the net!” as Winterbottom’s old chum Steve Coogan’s most famous alter-ego might say.

To be fair, Winterbottom has form in this department. His entertaining, equally self-reflexive A Cock and Bull Story tackled Tristram Shandy  – famously a story that never leads anywhere. Similarly, The Face of an Angel tells a story to which the Winterbottom figure played by Daniel Brühl considers there can be no conclusion (though in real life the courts may beg to differ).

Brühl plays Thomas Lang, a glum, coke-snorting filmmaker who’s undergoing a mid-life crisis because his TV actress wife ran off with her screen husband, taking their young daughter with her. He’s hired to make a film about the ongoing trial of student Jessica Fuller (Gaunt) and her boyfriend for the murder of housemate Elizabeth Pryce (Bennett). The names have been changed and the scene of the crime relocated to Siena, but this is a meticulous reconstruction of the Knox/Kercher case, right down to the footage of That Kiss. To research his film, Thomas heads for Tuscany, where he’s introduced to the local hack pack by sexy stringer Simone Ford (Beckinsale). They’re a raucous, cynical, gossiping bunch, desperate for any sliver of information and given to much black humour. Just in case we don’t realise how much we’re supposed to dislike them, Winterbottom includes an almost cartoonishly unpleasant Daily Mail hack in their ranks.

Brooding Thomas also befriends a young English waitress named Melanie (model Cara Delevingne, acquitting herself well) and succumbs to a succession of dreams and visions, augmented by some pretty ropy digital FX, that are clearly intended to parallel Dante’s Divine Comedy. Some ham-fisted and obvious points are made along the way (“There is no such thing as truth or justice,” wails Thomas. “It’s just a popularity contest!”), along with much finger-pointing that will delight puritans of left and right who are eager to recast all natural curiosity about sex and death as ‘prurient’. Weirdly enough for a film that concludes with a solemn dedication to Meredith Kercher, we actually learn as little about Elizabeth/Meredith as we did from contemporary news reports of the crime, as Winterbottom seems mainly concerned with the dull existential crisis of a noble filmmaker. When Thomas tells his crestfallen backers of his plan to “transcend truth” with a Dante-inspired drama rather than delivering the true-crime thriller he was commissioned to make, it’s hard not to share their disappointment.