Angels & Insects @ 25: Entomological Perversions
Wednesday, January 27, 2021 at 12:00PM 
Angels & Insects arrived in US theaters 25 years ago. The picture had had its premiere at the 48th Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or but it would take several more months for it to get a commercial release in the UK and the States. Once that happened, Phillip Haas' adaptation of an A.S. Byatt novel received plenty of acclaim from such renowned critics as Roger Ebert, conquering enough buzz to get a surprising, if deserved, Best Costume Design Oscar nomination. Nowadays, the flick isn't talked about, which is a terrible injustice as far as I'm concerned.
To rectify such lack of contemporary discussion, let's try to explore the sensuous perversions and entomological nightmares of this tale insects, incest, and insidiousness…
Despite being mainly set in the well-lit dining rooms and genteel parlors of Victorian England, Angels & Insects starts in the deep darkness of the wilderness. Over a black screen, strange noises move like a wave, drowning the spectator in sounds that feel somewhere between humanity and the insect world. As light breaks through the shadow, we find sweaty bodies dancing, leafy costumes clattering in a cacophony that reminds one of the cicadas' song. We're in the Amazons, in the company of a naturalist named William Adamson. He looks as if he were intoxicated by his surroundings, at home in the hubbub of the Native people even though he's a clear outsider. Cut to swirling ballgowns, blinding light, and blindingly bright colors, a society where nothing's as it seems.
After a tragic shipwreck, Adamson has found himself marooned in the polite world of the Alabaster clan, aristocratic patrons of the sciences that welcome him into their fold in the same fashion a predator might let their prey come close. We never see the transition from the jungle to the ballroom and arrive, like the protagonist, into this new environment with a degree of nervous disorientation. In seemingly no time, Adamson has become infatuated with the eldest daughter of the family, Eugenia. They soon wed after a courting made through clouds of butterflies and a proposal marred by the disquieting touch of giant moths. Before characters or audience can regain their bearing, there's pregnancy, and with it arrive the first signs of rot.
The central metaphor is fairly obvious and overbearing at times, the comparison between Victorian society and the invertebrate cosmos growing blunter by the minute. The Alabaster family rules itself like a hive of killer bees or some aggressive colony of warrior ants. The queen is the center of the world, her fecundity making her a baby-making machine, the womb-like sun around which every other member of the clan orbits. Hereditary insular wealth is a corroding agent that destroys the soul and the world which encircles it, helping set these rules of women as birthing agents and men as genetic continuators. Breeding and purity of blood are odious ideas common to the matters of animal farming and noble genealogy.
In Angels & Insects, all this concern with breeding means that sex is explicit but not sexy. As in the old tradition of arthouse European cinema, graphic licentiousness is often the vehicle for the most repellant depictions of human sexuality, naked bodies reduced to fleshy mounds writhing in ecstasy that looks more like agony than pleasure. The characters' scientific interests serve as a pretext for the filmmakers to regard them with the same clinical detachment of a taxonomist. Alienation is a purposeful feature of the formal and tonal idioms that define the film, even when it's depicting carnality. Its theses on the venomous perversion of the aristocracy aren't the most original, sure, but the way it presents its findings is shocking thanks to boldness of design, shamelessness, a willingness for prurient disgust.
Nonetheless, Haas' direction is virtuously elegant. His chilly formalism contrasts with the aforementioned taste for the vile, the vulgar, the sordidly voluptuous. So much so that even the innocent image of laughing girls in confections of pink ruffles, throwing rose petals at the camera, rings with a spike of unsettlement. Innocence looks obscene. After all this deliberate unsavoriness, the conclusions of the story feel perchance even more daring than the vivisection of aristocratic inbreeding. In the end, work and intellectual pursuit trump whatever follies the heart and the sex may encumber. It's the scientific research of Adamson and the Alabaster's steely governess, Matty, that prevails and sets the stage for future hope. The heart is fickle and so is the turgid genital, intellectual legacy is forever.
Regarding matters of performance, Mark Rylance is a wonderful lead, in the role of Adamson, weaponizing the quiet watchfulness laced with theatrical enunciation that characterizes so many of his screen performances. However, it's Kristin Scott Thomas' Matty that announces herself as the indisputable MVP of Angels & Insects. She cuts through the film's moral gangrene with the ease of a hot knife cutting butter. Dry and brittle, an angular counterpoint to the alabaster softness of Matty's employees, merciless with her tongue, she's uniquely willing to ravage the narrative's tone without mercy or concern. Watching her is a bracing spectacle, especially as the story reaches its end and the actress completely blows the flick open, her tortured sincerity festering into an incandescent rage.
If we return to the entomological metaphor, one can almost imagine Thomas' Matty as an intrepid black ant living among red predators, choosing to refuse her fate and the dominion of the bigger animal but always making sure she'll survive the feat. The thespian is wise enough not to play Matty as the clichéd archetype of the woman living in the wrong time. She performs the governess as someone so used to the social orders that she never outwardly bristles against them, preferring to make her path through the loopholes in the hierarchical contract of Victorian England. It's a perfect performance for which I'd have awarded Thomas with a Best Supporting Actress nomination in 1996, maybe even the win.
Speaking of awards, let's talk about those Oscar-nominated costumes. The designs serve to reinforce the insectoid horridness of the Alabasters, especially when it comes to the wardrobe's use of color. Aniline dyes had just become available at the time the story is set, popularizing the fashion for bold shades. However, even the most advanced dying technology of the 1860s couldn't hope to create such eye-searing textiles as the ones presented in Paul Brown's designs. Patsy Kensit's Eugenia spends the picture dressed in nightmares of 19th-century couture making her look like a variety of bugs, from bees to butterflies. Whatever entomological inspiration defines her outfits, one constant remains: she and the Alabasters as a whole are repellant creatures whose beauty is only appreciable if we stand at a distance.
Despite its title, there are no angels in this film, only human-shaped insects dressed in colorful carapaces made of silk and beautiful lies.
Reader Comments (16)
I love this movie. Shoulda been Mark Rylances first oscar nomination.
I don't think I've seen this movie since it came out but I remember really loving it. There are one or two shocking moments from the film which have remained in my memory all these years.
I read it because i was curious about the movie and never found it anywhere. I liked the book and would love to see how it translates onscreen...
Wow! I wasn't expecting this!
I watched Angels & Insects on VHS... I remember finding the cover particularly alluring alongside its mates under the Drama section at my local Blockbuster.
Suffice to say, I was not prepared, haha. For whatever reason, this and Total Eclipse tuck themselves away together in my memory, underappreciated gems that are also crass and almost vulgar in their desire to tell unwanted truths about people and desire and even the human heart.
Thanks for bringing me back to 1995, Cláudio!
Patsy was truly lovely in this and with a major push could have gained an Oscar nomination plus she worked with Pet Shop Boys so 10 bonus points.
I LOVE THIS MOVIE TOO. I was going to write about it before Claudio offered and thanks for doing it justice, Claudio.
If this is a series on movies with a sole Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design I'm totally into it and thank you.
Can we have a Costume Design smackdown series?
Heard of it never seen it- but now I will have to
If we have a Costume Design Smackdown, can we PLEASE start with 2006? To this day, I'm still not sure who I'd vote for!!!!
This film has one of the most attractive cast and young Mark Rylance ... 😘😘😘😘😘. The English are critical of their traditions and social rules and at the same time so proud and concerned about maintaining them. :-P
I like A&I, even if maybe Haas and co. is not as effective as it could have been, considering Byatt’s story potential (but I prefer it to LaBute’s Possession adaptation). I remember it wasn’t acclaimed in Cannes 1995 (even if a famous Italian columnist considered, maybe overestimating, the lovely Patsy Kensit as a Best Actress contender), so its success with American critics was a nice surprise. Scott Thomas is at the top of her craft (of course she could have been Oscar nominated as best supporting actress but the Best Actress nom for The English Patient was very important for her career) and the costume design is deserved all the kudos
It's been years since I've seen the film in its entirety and Kristen Scott Thomas really was the star of that film as I just found her to be enjoyable as I would've loved the movie to focus more on her.
I've been trying to see this movie for YEARS! I remember it being shown on TV quite often when I was younger and I could never catch it from the beginning, but there was something weird (maybe even perverse) about it that always intrigued me. I hope one of these boutique labels can put it out on blu-ray or something.
Yeah, we are all bugs!
Arkaan -- He's very good in it, but I don't think I'd nominate him.
Dave in Hollywood -- It is a very memorable experience. Though I might be saying that 'cause I watched it at a very impressionable age XD
Clement.Paris -- I own it on DVD, so that's how I saw it. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere. You can watch it on ok ru though: https://ok.ru/video/309204617891
Manny -- Thank you for the lovely comment and for reading my write-up.
markgordonuk -- She's very good, I agree.
NATHANIEL R -- I'm glad you were happy with this piece. I was fearful i couldn't do the picture justice.
Peggy Sue -- To be perfectly honest, I really like that idea. Might pitch it to Nathaniel one of these days.
Jaragon -- Hope you enjoy it once you do. It's a perverse delight.
Mirko -- Scott Thomas is indeed fabulous. Thanks for the historical context regarding the film's initial critical reception.
thevoid99 -- I think she works great as a supporting presence. Don't know if she'd be as effective if the film focused on her as a lead actress. Some roles are meant to be supporting, even though they're brilliant.
Feline Justice -- According to this movie, yes we are.