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Canberra Today 14°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Movie review / ‘Angel of Mine’ (MA) **

“Angel of Mine” (MA) **

DIVORCEE Lizzie (Noomi Rapace) looks at little girls in search of the infant daughter she lost in a hospital fire seven years earlier. 

And now she’s convinced that Lola (Annika Whiteley) lives in the family of Claire (Yvonne Strahovski), her husband (Richard Roxburgh) and their son who’s about the same age as Lizzie’s son.

That’s the fundamental premise of Kim Farrant’s remake of the 2008 French film “Mark of an Angel”. It’s made In Melbourne in an undefined era that, by the look of its cars, is definitely since the development of DNA profiling that courts of justice have deemed legal since 1983 and now is so well-known and common that it’s become affordable to folk wondering about their ancestry. 

Watching Farrant’s film aware of that wonderful forensic tool was intensely frustrating for me. I couldn’t comprehend why Lola, Lizzie and Claire didn’t get their DNAs profiled. Problem solved; one mother a winner, one mother not a winner, little girl’s world turned upside down or confirmed, let’s all go for a coffee!

Instead, “Angel of Mine” expects us to wear the notion that Lizzie’s insistence (without a shred of justification) that Lola is her daughter and her divorcing of a man who still loves her were both right actions and tough luck, Claire, mistakes can happen. 

The film’s acting is good and its middle-class Melbourne suburbs look attractive. But its dramatic conflict doesn’t ring credibly for a story purporting to be set more than six decades after Rosalind Franklin, “the dark lady of DNA”, made those first X-ray photographs of DNAs double helix that led in 1953 to Watson and Crick instead of her receiving a Nobel Prize.

I cannot commend a film that depends for its dramatic backbone on a solution for which there is so resounding a contrary proof.

At Dendy

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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