Troubled souls alone together in office tower
Flawed Montreal film never delivers on early promise
L’ange gardien ½ Starring: Guy Nadon, Marilyn Castonguay, Patrick Hivon, Véronique Le Flaguais Directed by: Jean-Sébastien Lord Running time: 94 minutes
Normand — played with real force by veteran actor Guy Nadon — is a lonely man. He is a night watchman in an office tower in downtown Montreal, and pretty much the only pleasure he has in life is listening on the radio to the games of his beloved Canadiens. (We actually get to hear sports-radio icon Ron Fournier ranting at one point.)
Every time the Habs score, Normand races up to a room in the building that has a TV, so he can catch the replay on RDS.
That’s about as exciting as it gets for him — until one night he stumbles upon a young man and woman who are trying to pull off a robbery in the building.
He chases them, but his fragile heart gives him some trouble and he can’t keep up the chase.
The woman, Nathalie (Marilyn Castonguay), is hurt in the chase and, before she takes off, she helps Normand take his heart pills.
A few weeks later, she returns to the scene of the crime and slowly begins an odd friendship with this solitary man.
She’s on the run from her violent, hard-drinking boyfriend, Guylain (Patrick Hivon), and is worried that he won’t take care of their young daughter.
Normand, meanwhile, has a fairly strained relationship with his wife, Monique (Véronique Le Flaguais), a state of affairs not helped by the fact that he turns up at home to go to sleep just as she’s starting her day.
Written and directed by Jean-Sébastien Lord, L’ange gardien starts off in auspicious fashion, but it never fully delivers on that early promise.
It doesn’t help that there’s a late-going plot twist that’s going to stretch most viewers’ suspension of disbelief a tad too far.
But Lord deserves top marks for making Normand and Nathalie such fully formed characters, and for helping elicit such fine performances from both actors.
Nadon is so good — as always — as this troubled man who has not been able to get
“Lord deserves top marks for making Normand and Nathalie such fully formed characters.”
any kind of closure on the death years earlier of his son.
Castonguay — who also stars in the recent release Miraculum — is also excellent, winning much sympathy as a woman who feels she doesn’t have many choices open to her in life.
Lord’s writing underlines the nuances of each character, which is nice to see for a change.
It all works best in the first half, as Lord slowly draws portraits of these two parallel lives and the gradual thawing of relations between them.
He also makes good use of the setting of the office building to reflect Normand’s isolated, alienated life.