The Face of an Angel - film review: Cara Delevingne is engaging in this clever muse on truth, justice and Meredith Kercher

This fictional take on the murder of Meredith Kercher and what really happened with Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito takes a rewardingly contemplative approach, says Demetrious Matheou
An unaffected screen presence: Cara Delevingne as Melanie
Demetrious Matheou31 March 2015

As the judicial quagmire concerning the murder of Meredith Kercher enters a new chapter this week, with Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s final appeal against conviction, there couldn’t be a more timely release for this take on the story.

One of our most mercurial directors, Michael Winterbottom, has eschewed true crime whodunit for a flawed but still rewardingly contemplative approach. His film muses on journalism, the justice system, film-making, and the labyrinth of truth, lies and corruption that has kept this case alive in the public’s imagination.

Winterbottom and writer Paul Viragh drop into the saga at the time of the first appeal. But they’ve changed names, Siena takes the place of Perugia, and their entry point to the story is fictional. A film-maker, Thomas Lang (Daniel Brühl), plans to make a feature about the trial. Arriving in Italy, he meets journalist Simone Ford (Kate Beckinsale) who has already written a book about it. Through her he encounters the press pack, including a tabloid hack and a shady Italian blogger who insists he knows what really happened — and has his own script.

“This one is going to run and run. Thank God,” says Simone, speaking for the freelancers who are making hay from the scandal. In London, Lang's producers are casting stars before he’s written a word of his own. For all of them, the chief interest is the American woman on trial (now named Jessica Fuller), variously described as a cunning manipulator, a drug-taking student killer and “the face of an angel”. Elizabeth Pryce, the victim, has been all but forgotten.

In search of his film, Lang swims against the tide by focusing on Pryce, less concerned with who killed her than the life that has been lost. Thus his most meaningful relationship in Siena is with another British student, Melanie (Cara Delevingne, displaying an unaffected, engaging screen presence), who becomes his guide and whose happy-go-lucky lifestyle carries echoes of those before her.

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1/99

There is too much here; Lang’s obsession with Dante’s Divine Comedy, the dream sequences and the blogger all test one’s patience. That said, Winterbottom has form with narrative sleights of hand (A Cock and Bull Story, 24 Hour Party People) and here he cleverly makes the film that his surrogate, Lang, would like to make — one that invests sobriety and pathos into the consideration of a genuine tragedy, and identifies Kercher as its angel.

Cert 15, 101 mins

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