Angel Deverell (Romola Garai) is certain of her writing despite her humble station. Her widowed mother has a grocery store and sees her as an useless dreamer. Publisher Theo Gilbright (Sam Neill) accepts Angel's book Lady Irania and is surprised to find the author to be actually a woman. His wife Hermione (Charlotte Rampling) doesn't really like the brash self-obsessed ingénue. Lady Irania becomes a great success and Angel buys the local mansion Paradise. She hires admirer Nora (Lucy Russell) as her secretary and marries Nora's womanizer indebted artist brother Esmé (Michael Fassbender). When war breaks out, she is angry that Esmé joins up to fight ruining her perfect life.Romola Garai is great at playing the annoyingly self-obsessed over-dramatic character. That's a double-edge sword. She's not particularly likable but she is fascinating. She's basically a bratty flamboyant teenager in a costume drama. The movie does kind of work in the same way her overwrought melodramatic novels work. That's a sort of poetry.

The source book was a satire on a truly dreadful author of the late 19th century, a sort of Barbara Cartland, but only more schlocky. If the intent was to have fun on this idea it was missed and badly; if it was taken at face value, it is a sign of incipient idiocy.It plays the whole thing very straight and it seems as if no one saw that this is utter complete trash. Douglas Sirk used to take rubbish - real mediocre uneducated garbage - and make a thing with it as Fassbinder extolled him for doing. It looks as if Ozon has done a Fassbinder and taken real nonsense, which has become a joke cliché of romantic fiction and not seen that it had always been a joke; a wry in-joke on the reader, and on the original writer.Why anyone ever signed up to do this is curious - apart form the money. Why it was financed is even more puzzling. No doubt people will watch this in 10 and 50 years and see something else altogether but none of it will do anything for the creative team behind this.The classic, "Cold Comfort Farm" was a parody of the romantic rural fiction popular in the early 20th century and this work is a roman a clef of the same type of demotic garbage that is consumed in bulk.Under no circumstances go anywhere near this and wipe all playback technologies that may have accessed it.

I must be a masochist. Ozon's work is tiresome, at best, yet, since he is clearly technically able, I keep saying 'maybe this time...' But no. This time is worse than all of the rest. This time is embarrassing kitsch. Poor Romola Garai - a wonderful actress. Here she is persuaded to over-act with such crass stupidity that she is almost unrecognisable from her stunning performance in 'Atonement'. OTT has its place in cinema, but it is a place that needs a context. Here there is no context, just tastelessness piled upon tastelessness.The characters do not engage. The relationships do not engage. The style is flowery enough to make the Chelsea Flower Show look drab - but to what effect? None. Style is nothing if it is not pointed in the direction or theme. (And theme is nothing if it is not arrived at through style.) The script of this may have looked fine, but once on the floor, Ozon killed it stone dead. By the end, I would not have been surprised if the director had entered screen left tap dancing and singing 'I'm gay, I'm gay, I'm gay.' (Lest it be thought I am homophobic - Pedro Almodovar is Europe's greatest director by a long way, in my estimation.) The sad thing is that, while other much much greater directors are unable to find the funds necessary to make great films, some idiots are willing to pour millions into this rubbish.Save one... there is one moment in the film which is beautiful - but it is borrowed from someone else. The moment when Angel encounters her husband's child is truly affecting - but it is too close for comfort to the moment in 'Once Upon A Time in America' when Noodles encounters Max' son.This film is absolute drivel.

This movie is rubbish. The only good aspect was that my wife won our tickets, so we didn't have to part with good money to see it.Nothing worked for me. The characterisations were poor. Sam Neill (as always) played Sam Neill and even Charlotte Rampling (for whom I have great admiration) couldn't save the film. I can only compare it to Titanic - not the movie but the ship.Who was Angelica? I know she had something to do with Paradise (which was shown in reverse over the gate of the house right at the beginning, but the right way around for the rest of the movie), but, as a character, she wasn't introduced. Was this edited out, or was I in a coma at the time and missed it? What went wrong with the background shots? Alfred Hitchcock did a better job of them in the 60s. How can it be that, with all the modern technology, it was so obvious and poor? I quite simply did not believe any of it. One man after the movie came up to my wife and myself with a bemused smile on his face and asked, "What was that all about?" He said he was expecting Angel to wake up and find it all a dream. My comment in reply, "Mas more like a nightmare" The only thing I found even remotely interesting was the way Esme used the wheelchair Angel gave him to hang himself from. This gives some idea as to how boring I found the rest! I suffered the movie expecting my wife to say that she found it moving (i.e. I thought it had to be a "chick flick" that only women can enjoy). Meanwhile, Barbara sat through it thinking that I must have found something "arty" about it. If we had only known, we could have walked out and not had to endure the torture.I could not, in all consciousness, recommend this movie - even to a person I hate.None of it worked; none of it inspired; none of it entertained. It was even too horrible to be amusing.