You may have guessed that romances onscreen leave me cold or catapult me into flash of white hot anger in context of the genre which often serves as a potent distillation of patriarchal perversions about what it means to be a man and a woman and what love should be all about. It's often about women's surrender and male domination. Take "Last Tango in Paris," for example which received widespread critical praise by even the likes of Pauline Kael. Watching a young woman be humiliated, raped, and tortured for over two hours in an attempt to break her will and establish Marlon Brando's supremacy is not my idea of art. There are just too many twisted fairy tales produced in this vein like clockwork. Periodically, an exception comes along where we get a romance where two equals are matched and we believe and care about them as lovers.

After reading John Lynch's first novel "Torn Water" earlier in the week, I got to thinking about "Angel Baby" (1995) and picked up a copy on VHS. Lynch has the singular talent of portraying vulnerable men onscreen, making me regard him as a successor to Montgomery Clift. There are plenty of dudes who can kick ass and be a hard man for their film career, but its a revelation to see an actor like Lynch engage a man's full emotional range. He breaks my heart in "Angel Baby" as a man who once worked for IBM as a successful software engineer who suffers a mental collapse and then falls in love. "Angel Baby" is the best romance you've never seen.

There are no spoliers in this post so you can run out and enjoy it yourself. The film opens with a crane shot looking down at Harry Goodman (John Lynch as the allegorically named protagonist) with his arms fully extended to catch and enjoy the rainstorm. One benefit attached to the official diagnosis of "crazy" is that it frees you up a bit from the constraints of adulthood. You have a little extra room to do what's normally frowned upon like enjoying a nice rainstorm. Harry takes his mates from group therapy session out bowling. It's clear that he minds them with care and is fairly mentally stable. He lives with his brother Morris and sister-in-law Louise and their son in an Australian suburb. Why his brother has a Scottish accent and he has an Irish one escapes the viewer, yet that's just me being nit-picky.

Harry meets Kate (Jacqueline McKenzie) in a therapy session and gushes about her later at the dinner table. After their next session he follows her. They talk and then compare stab wounds. Kate has long slashes on her arm placed in a way that tells him it wasn't self-inflicted unlike the parallel scars on his own wrists. Suddenly, she announces that she has to get to a television so that she can write down the puzzles on "Wheel of Fortune." Her guardian angel sends her messages through them everyday. Boldly, he says he wants to ask the guardian angel if he and Kate will be together. The solved puzzle is the song title "You are my special angel." That clinches it. They make love under a bridge and in a phone booth, a scene which is far hotter than Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater getting in on in "True Romance." The "Wheel of Fortune" puzzles play a prominent role throughout the plot. Harry and Kate move in together, he goes off his meds, and gets a job. Kate collects the neighbor's laundry to earn some money. They enjoy their own space and start building a life together. When Kate gets pregnant they encounter resistance from the therapists and Harry's family worried about their ability to raise a child. You believe in them and want to see them come out on top through their desire to have what everyone else has in love and stability with a family.

Lynch and McKenzie turn out superior performances. Lynch has a perfect nose and his eyes would melt the blue off your jeans. Give it a go.