Bodice-ripping Chick Lit comes to the big screen in Angel, a bizarre and often hilarious film about a self-centred novelist.

Set in England around 1900, Angel is both a sly take on the melodramatic films of another era -- imagine sets and scenery out of The Magnificent Ambersons, for example -- and a spoof of contemporary celebrity, among other things.

It's also a big, juicy rags-to-riches story. Very Douglas Sirk, in many ways.

Angel is director Francois Ozon's (Under the Sand, 8 Women, Swimming Pool) first English language film.

The movie is based on a novel by Elizabeth Taylor, but Ozon has somewhat softened Taylor's shallow, aggressive heroine.

Angel, played by Romola Garai, is a grasping, childish dreamer, and wonderful to watch. Garai, a British actress who looks a bit like Angelina Jolie but with the crazy wiped off, plays a sort of exaggerated Scarlet O'Hara.

Everything about Angel is over-the-top, and it's a film that people seem to love or hate, with little middle ground.

We meet Angel when she is still a schoolgirl, living above her mother's grocery shop and dreaming of a much bigger life.

She peers longingly through the gates of the big house in her village; Paradise House, it's called, and it's home to a girl about Angel's age. Angel's aunt works there as a maid. In Angel's vivid imagination, Paradise House, or some country pile just like it, will someday be hers.

Angel is mocked by her teacher and disciplined by her mother, but she won't stop writing feverish tales about aristocratic heroines. She sends off her novel, "Lady Irania" to London, and is summoned by a publisher (played by Sam Neill) who is willing to take a chance on her.

As we've already heard Angel say, "I don't read. Books don't interest me," there's no mystery about what sort of writer she is. Nonetheless, Sam Neill's character knows her lavish stories about love and success will find an audience. His wife (Charlotte Rampling) observes the scene with great disapproval: Angel is rude and greedy on every level.

And Angel soon becomes famous.

With wealth and celebrity under her belt, Angel next tackles love. That turns up in the form of a painter named Esme (Michael Fassbender) and his sister Nora (Lucy Russell); Esme is a self-indulgent womanizer who eventually marries Angel, and Nora is a slavish fan of Angel's work. She's secretly in love with Angel and becomes her secretary.

Angel, meanwhile, lives the life she imagined for herself -- overdecorated and overwrought in every way. Anything harsh or unseemly is ignored, denied or painted over.

She manipulates everyone around her and recreates herself and her life on a whim: In other words, she makes it all up as she goes along.

Angel is particularly good at fabricating whole new lives for people, especially herself. Ozon reflects her endless shifting between fantasy and reality in a visual, and often humorous fashion -- Angel's elaborate honeymoon, for example, is illustrated with a travelogue sequence that is cheerfully fake and clunky.

At any rate, even as things turn dark, Angel's life still plays out as if she were at the centre of one of her lugubrious, melodramatic novels.

Ozon and his cast appear to be having quite a lark with Angel. The film has complicated performances and plenty of lavish carry-on to look at; on the downside, it's too long and a lot of the humour may be too "inside."

Angel is like some deranged cousin of what Todd Haynes did with Far From Heaven, and is probably a must-see for film students.

(This film is rated G)

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