TV on DVD: Fallen Angel (2007)

This Quiet Shocker of a "Whydunnit" Miniseries
That Riveted International Viewers
Takes You Deep Inside the Mind
Of a Dangerously Deadly Daddy's Girl
On 4/28/09

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As we discover throughout the alternately riveting yet disturbing made-for-ITV miniseries Fallen Angel adapted from Andrew Taylor’s internationally successful, lauded Requiem for an Angel: The Roth Trilogy, crime instead of love grows where Emilia Fox’s sinister Rosemary goes.

A “whydunnit” in every sense of the word—promising as the tagline boasts to uncover just what was involved in “the making of a murderer”—over the course of director Andrew Drury’s eerily creepy three episodes, we venture far back into the life of Fox’s psychopathic character born Rosemary who goes by the deceptive name of Angel in the first shocking episode.

The film is deeply unsettling from the start as Angel abducts a young girl for reasons unknown while living with a mentally challenged potential pedophile. And while as someone with a major reluctance to watch works that fixate on child endangerment, I share DVDTalk critic Jeffrey Kauffman’s humanistic decision to reveal that the girl who becomes Angel’s prey is released without injury—it’s nonetheless a work sure to divide audiences with or without that spoiler.

As the sinister and easily demonic Angel, Fox (The Pianist) delves so convincingly into the twisted side buried beneath her surface level beauty, I couldn’t help but think it was a pity that The Pianist director Roman Polanski hadn’t utilized her for one of his definitive psychological dramas from the era of Rosemary’s Baby, Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Chinatown.

Although most mysteries would’ve ended when Fox was taken into custody for the abduction of the darling daughter of a police officer and his newly appointed vicar wife at the end of Fallen Angel’s first episode ("The Four Last Things"), that’s where the work truly begins as a few secrets of the woman dubbing herself Angel’s past are revealed and furthermore in the second and third episodes as we move to the development of two key incidents in her life that may have helped create the monster she was to become.

Far more interested in the “nurture” question than the “nature” one in terms of the psychological development of the detached woman—in the heavily padded but riveting second episode (that somewhat confuses when you begin to look too deeply into a few potential plot-holes), we move to Angel/Rosie’s awkward teenage years in "The Judgement of Strangers" as she’s desperate to keep her vicar father’s attention when he plans to remarry.

While perhaps the most chilling and undeniably devastating episode is in the final one-- "The Office of the Dead," that travels way back in time to encounter Rosie in 1979—it’s startling to piece together the events of her life as we discover what everyone around her has been hiding with half-truths, secrets meant to protect, and disturbing revelations that come tumbling out when characters in the first episode reappear in other forms throughout the rest of the series.

Additionally, screenwriter Peter Ramsley balances out Rosie’s plot-line with a local, disturbing tale of a mad religious leader given the far too-on-the-nose writerly name of “Youlgreave.” While he gets an "A" for effort in trying to make sense in everything found in Taylor’s source material by managing to weave a heavy horror-lite dose of sacrifice and satanic ritual into the narrative—the overlap between these two histories is never quite rock solid except in that it’s certain to help keep viewers up nights when you couple them together into the work’s disturbing effect.

Admirably, British television has always offered superlative programming in the realm of taking an analytical view of crime by working in the sociology and psychology of the cases to stunning effect especially in shows such as one of the UK’s finest-- Cracker.

And the high quality production values of the gorgeously lensed Fallen Angel are no exception as the visual look of the 16:9 aspect ratio film captured on this stunning DVD transfer make it appear on par with a cinematic feature film that’s just as upsetting in its beauty as the series’ icy sinister Hitchockian blonde murderess.

Still, ultimately, there’s something about the work that still kept me at an arm’s distance. For, although the individual pieces of the puzzle are sure to rivet—some of the sequencing seems to make this particular Angel a forced, tough fit where some reshaping may have been necessary to give it the precision and clarity it needed in helping present a more wholly plausible picture.

Of course, additional viewings may help clear up any misconceptions considerably and likewise aid in tying together a few of the loose strands and overlapping characters and plots that grow far more complex as we travel back into time. Needless to say, admittedly, by the time the film has finished we have a greater understanding of Fox’s character than we did from the start.

Still, nonetheless, I’m still uncertain whether the “making of a murderer” paradigm was much more than a gimmick since there’s still some gaps left in between and points-of-view abandoned that would’ve been vital to capture to better assess the depths this particular Angel fell to over the years beginning (or structurally ending) with an ultimate shocker when she was barely out of diapers that is sure to find you stunned long after the final credits begin to play.

Ballet Shoes

After Tom Hanks and his “big bad chain store” force Meg Ryan’s sweet little children’s bookstore, The Shop Around the Corner, out of business in Nora Ephron’s 1998 cinematic charmer You’ve Got Mail, she visits Hanks’ business for herself in a heartbreaking scene. And in the film, inspired by not only Lubitsch’s original movie (The Shop Around the Corner) as well as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Ryan winds up in the children’s department where her expertise on the subject matter is quickly required when a clueless salesperson is unable to identify a customer’s request for the “Shoe books” or their author. Immediately recognizing the source, Ryan snaps away from self-pity and into helpful attention, sharing through tears, “Noel Streatfeild wrote Ballet Shoes and Skating Shoes and Theater Shoes and Movie Shoes… I'd start with Skating Shoes, it's my favorite, although Ballet Shoes is completely wonderful.”

And ever since that moment, I’ve been fascinated by not only the Shoes series but Noel Streatfeild as well. Yet it’s always a sad fact of a hectic twenty-first century life filled with multi-tasking that there aren’t often enough hours in the day to squeeze in the reading we’d love to do with the reading we’re forced to do for school and work. Thus, I’d forgotten all about my promise to track down Ballet Shoes but was recently reminded this month by my mother who returned from the movies gushing about a trailer she’d seen for a cinematic adaptation of Streatfeild’s classic Ballet Shoes.

Originally produced for Granada Television for the BBC and adapted by screenwriter Heidi Thomas and director Sandra Goldbacher (Me Without You, The Governess), Ballet Shoes premiered during Christmas of 2007 to great success in the UK. And it’s getting the royal treatment for its American debut, opening in limited theatrical release this week before its DVD from KOCH Vision hits shelves on September 2. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that despite its late summer release that the film's popularity should build steadily not only as there’s so few worthwhile films for young women but it also stars Harry Potter’s very own Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) in a refreshingly feminine and challenging period performance.

Although in an intelligent and thoughtful twenty minute interview included on the DVD, Emma Watson admits that she’d never read the 1936 classic, she phoned her grandmother who shared her own love for Ballet Shoes as a girl, saying that it was not only a personal favorite but changed her outlook on life in its illustration that everything is possible. And it’s that message that still shines through more than seventy years later in this delightful and high quality adaptation.

In its opening credit sequence, Shoes is reminiscent of The Secret Garden as we encounter the young Sylvia Brown who dressed in dark mourning wear arrives — with her devoted Nana in tow — to live at the house of Sylvia’s only living relative after the death of her parents. Although Sylvia’s uncle, Professor Matthew Brown (Richard Griffiths), an eccentric paleontologist and globe-trotting explorer, is initially hesitant to let a child into his life, they soon grow attached to one another. And just as quickly, after she grows into a young woman in her own right (now played by Emilia Fox) and his travels continuously take him away from home for extended periods of time, she’s startled when he begins sending back his own version of “fossils” from his expeditions.

For — unlike traditional fossils — the eternally caring professor, who seems to be always in the wrong place at the right time, first rescues an orphaned baby aboard the Titanic and sends her back to be raised by his own charge and Nana (Victoria Wood), only to repeat the process two additional times before he disappears altogether. Soon without the means to send the three girls — Pauline (Watson), Petrova (Yasmin Paige), and Posy Fossil (Lucy Boynton) — to receive a traditional education, Sylvia has to rely on her ingenuity and determination to keep things afloat.

After taking in a group of free-spirited boarders, including two elderly female professors, she’s able to entrust their academic math and literature-based education directly to them. However, in realizing that the world isn’t kind to girls who can’t support themselves, Sylvia takes the advice of her bewitching and bold boarder, the former dancer Theo Dane (Lucy Cohu) who encourages Sylvia to enroll the girls in the Children’s Academy of Dancing and Stage Training.

While Posy Fossil, who had arrived special delivery with only her birth mother’s pair of beautiful pink satin ballet shoes to her name, shows a naturally prodigious aptitude for dance, Pauline finds herself drawn to the stage. Soon, the girls begin earning enough money to help out their beloved caretaker “Garnie,” who seems to be increasingly stressed by not just the financial and time-consuming struggle and poor health but also fear that too much ambition and fame isn’t the right thing to encourage for her adored girls.

Yet even though Posy and Pauline seem thrilled by their feminine and artistic studies, the tomboy Petrova is far more hesitant, going along to auditions out of duty and loyalty, but with a serious passion towards finding “roads in the sky” in becoming a female pilot like her hero Amy Johnson. Her love of engines is encouraged by Sylvia’s charming male boarder Mr. Simpson (Marc Warren), for whom Sylvia seems to have developed romantic feelings as we realize that much to our heartbreak—in a life spent in service to the three bright girls—she’s never been able to allow herself to consider her own wants and needs.

Ballet Shoes: The Official Theatrical Trailer

With gorgeous cinematography by Catherine Ashmore (view the photo gallery), Ballet Shoes is one of those enchanting movies that, although set in the 1930s, seems all the more incredible for the vital pre-feminist messages set forth by Streatfeild in her text. As the girls routinely state on their birthdays and Christmas that “we three Fossils vow to put our name in the history books, because it is ours, and ours alone and no one can say it’s because of our grandfathers,” they truly seek to achieve their dreams on their own terms, never taking shortcuts or depending on a man to get them there and it’s all the more amazing when you realize the original publication date of the novel.

Featuring subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired along with deleted scenes, the beautiful DVD transfer also includes a valuable interview with Watson sure to impress her fans as she compares and contrasts working on this film with Potter and reflects on the film itself, as well as an audiobook excerpt (read by Elizabeth Sastre) and limited edition mini-poster.

Recommended by The Dove Foundation as worthwhile “family entertainment,” and highly recommended by this enthusiastic reviewer, Goldbacher’s film is the best one I’ve seen aimed at young female audiences this year, surpassing even the superlative Kit Kittredge: An American Girl Mystery (which incidentally took place in the same era except here in the states). Additionally, Ballet Shoes is one sure to touch the hearts of viewers — especially females — of all ages whether they’re just getting their first pair of pink slippers, taking aviation lessons, running a shop around the corner, or tucking their grandchildren in at night.