La Vie rêvée des anges

"Dreamlife of Angels" is an absorbing film about two young French women struggling to find their place in life. Both are solidly working class, unskilled and rootless. Circumstance has thrown them together and the film describes a two-month period as they housesit the apartment of a car accident victim. Their prospects are not great, and each deals with the hand life has dealt them very differently.

This is not an uplifting movie, but not a downer either. It tells it's story straight up and unflinchingly. Everything about it is top drawer; the screenplay, the directing and especially the acting by the two young leads, Elodie Bouchez and Natacha Regnier. We'll definitely see more them in the future. This movie is highly recommended.

Two French girls who are "not the chosen ones" (to recall Cyndi Laper) befriend one another after meeting at a sweat shop where they operate sewing machines. One of them, Marie (Natacha Régnier) is apartment-sitting for a mother and her daughter who are in the hospital, victims of an accident. The other, Isabelle (Élodie Bouchez) has been living day to day with her backpack on her back, sometimes selling handmade cards on street corners. Almost immediately there is an affinity, and they find joy and adventure in one another's company.

Part of the power of Erick Zonca's forceful and precise direction is to make us not only identify with his two heroines, but to force us see the world from their point of view. They are tossed about by strong emotions, powerfully projected by both actresses. Their lives and happiness are at the whim of forces beyond their control, the most powerful of which are their own feelings.

When I was a little boy and went to the movies I would see three films, bang, bang, bang, one after the other, and when I came out, five or six hours later, I was transformed. I had grown, and I could see the world in a different way. Of course I was a little boy and every little bit of experience was amazing and added to my knowledge of the world. Now, such transformations, like moments of Zen enlightenment, are rare and precious. The Dream Life of Angels is one of those rare and precious films that has the kind of power to make us see the world afresh as though for the very first time.

Bouchez and Régnier shared the Best Actress award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival for their work in this movie. Indeed it is hard to choose between them. Both are wonderful. Bouchez's character, Isabelle, has a gentle, fun-loving, child-like nature, tomboyish and sentimental. Marie is cynical, uptight and wired. Her emotions swing wildly from deep pessimism to a tenuous hope for something better in this life. When she is seduced, rather forcefully, by the arrogant and predatory Chris (Grégoire Colin) who owns nightclubs and is accustomed to having his way with women, she is stunned to find that she wants him, needs him, loves him. But she knows (and is warned by Isabelle) that he is just using her and will dump her. She hates herself for loving him and therefore lashes out at Isabelle who is a witness to her humiliation.

As a counterpoint to the raw animal love that Marie finds in Chris, there is the tender, dreamlike love that Isabelle finds for the daughter of the woman who owns the apartment. The mother dies from her injuries, but the daughter, Sandrine, lives on in a coma. Isabelle finds Sandrine's diary and reads it, and is touched by the sentiments expressed by the girl, and falls in love with her. A nurse tells Isabelle: "You can talk to her. She's sleeping, but she can hear you." Whether she can or not, we don't know, but to show her love Isabelle visits the comatose girl in the hospital and reads from her diary to her.

In a sense we feel that the dream life of angels is the dream of Sandrine, who is dreaming the life of the young women who are living in her apartment.

She is an angel and they are her dream, a troubled dream of raw emotion contrasted with her state of quiet somnolence.

The Dream Life of Angels is beautifully shot in tableaux of pastel interiors in which the characters are sometimes seen at offset as in portraits. In one scene we see one of the girls in the apartment while in the right upper corner is a window through which we see in clear focus a car pass in front of a picturesque building, so that the scene is seen in layers, so that we experience the inner life and the outside world at once. In another scene, Isabelle is reading Sandrine's diary, which we see over her shoulder. Just as she reads the words that excite her passion for the girl, there is just the slightest quickening of tempo as Isabelle flips the page to see what Sandrine writes next, and in that small gesture, we feel the emotions of the girls, the one who wrote the words and the one who reads them.

As a foil to the smooth, but bestial Chris, we are given Charlie (Patrick Mercado), fat motorcycle dude who is gentle and wise. This enlightened juxtaposition of character is part of director Erick Zonca's technique. We see it also in the contrasting characters of Marie and Isabelle.

Obviously this is a work of art, but it is also a triumph of film making in a directorial sense. Zonca's careful attention to detail and his total concentration throughout turn something that might have been merely original into a masterful work of art.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

At the risk of sounding like a quote whore, if I see ten films better than this one released this year, 1999 is going to be an excellent year. First time director Erick Zonca has made an absolutely stunning debut, which not only resonates while you watch it, but gets you thinking afterwards (for example, I didn't get that last shot right away, but after thinking about it, I did). And while there's a philosophical point to be made, this is not what I would call a "nothingness of being" movie, where the primary interest of the filmmaker would seem to be either lecturing the audience, or in self-indulgent symbolism. Instead, Zonca makes his points lightly and carefully, allowing them to build up for us later.

Of course, it also helps that he has the services of Elodie Bouchez and Natacha Regnier, who deservedly shared the Best Actress Award at Cannes last year(and if there's any justice, will be nominated for an Oscar this year). Bouchez's Isa is hooked on life, in a dreamy way, and is open to all the possibilities, yet she sees how fleeting it all is. Regnier's Marie, on the other hand, doesn't expect much from the hand she's been dealt, and enters a bad relationship because of it, but there's enough there that we desperately wish she could find the peace Isa wishes her near the end. I forget who said great acting is in the eyes, but Bouchez and Regnier certainly qualify there; you can see the life in Bouchez's, and the cold resignation in Regnier's. This is an outstanding film.

This film confirms my long-held suspicion that their films are the best. They may not make as much money as US films but at least they offer something of substance. Clearly, this is not a feel-good movie. And no, it's not about beautiful people living ostentatiously in palatial houses and wearing designer colthes. It's about the real life of two normal people and, although that might not appear to be a recipe for a particularly fascinating film, I was enthralled. It is so rare nowadays to see a films that conveys emotions and human relationships so powerfully and I have no hesitation in putting this film in my short list of the best I've seen in recent years.

In detail, two girls whose lives are drifting nowhere are staying rent-free in the flat of a family all but one of whom have been killed in a car accident. One of the girls has a family background that we never learn more about but which is clearly unhappy. She pins her hopes on a rich boyfriend whose father owns the nightclub they frequent. The other girl is more of a thoughtful type and becomes obsessed with the only survivor from the car accident whom she regularly visits in hospital, where she is lying in a deep coma. The girls' lives start to take different directions, their relationship breaks down and one of them starts to lose her mind. Any further detail would spoil the plot but the final scene shows one of the girls working in a clean and efficient-looking factory which is in marked contrast to the tacky sweat shop where the girls were working at the beginning of the film. For all the tragedy, the film's message is ultimately one of hope: however hard life is, don't give up.

Think of desperate couples in cinema and you conjure up Joe Buck and Ratzo from "Midnight Cowboy" or "Thelma and Louise". After seeing the beautifully done French film, "Dreamlife of Angels", you must add Isa and Marie to that list. "Dreamlife of Angels" triumphs because it is a story simply told and acted with such real-life honesty that you feel intimately tied to the main characters by film's end. It also helps that it is filmed mostly with a hand-held camera giving close ups and studied portraits of two people's alienated lives. Isabella is twenty-one, moving from town to town with all her worldly belongings on her backpack, intelligent yet strangely without much of a future. Marie is the same age and in the same rut, seemingly without any anchor herself although she does have a flat she is 'house-sitting' since the mother and daughter occupants have been involved in a tragic auto accident. They want to chain smoke their way through life, devoid of wealth and ambition. There is much insight into their broken lives when Isa remarks that her father left her mother for another woman when she was young while Marie counters that having separated parents is better than to have an abusive father living together with her victimized mother. The title of this film suggests an angelic life but it is clear from their bleak existence that it is a wish and a yearning rather than reality. Isa and Marie do get to share each other's misery. And their desire not to follow the cookie cutter mode does unite them for awhile (the film makes pointed references to a sewing factory and an electronics workplace where everyone is doing the exact tedious chore). However Marie falls prey to her blind passion to love and be loved and cannot tolerate the conscience personified by Isa. For it is Isa that nags about loyalty to friends, about the scoundrel boyfriend Chris who will only break her heart and about a bond of fidelity toward Sandrine, hospitalized in a deep coma and someone Isa knows only from reading her personal diary. "Dreamlife of Angels" could have passed as another soap opera if not for the genuine performances of Elodie Bouchez as Isa and Natacha Regnier as Marie. Their smiles and grimaces are heartfelt and it is their portraits which illuminate a most telling story of love, betrayal, and finally resignation.