Lille women

Zonca's Angels gets down to earth

by Peter Keough

THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS. Directed by Erick Zonca. Written by Erick Zonca and Roger Bohbot. With Elodie Bouchez, Natacha Régnier, Grégoire Colin, Jo Prestia, and Patrick Mercado. A Sony Pictures Classics release. At the Avon.

Reality eludes Hollywood -- something it happily celebrates in such films as The Matrix and EDtv. European cinema seems to heading in the same direction, if the recent triumph of Life Is Beautiful is any indication. Some younger French directors, however, have taken the radical stand that even when unadorned by fantasy, special effects, sentimentality, or generic conventions, life can be not only beautiful but sublime. One of these is Erick Zonca, whose first feature, The Dreamlife of Angels, is a reminder that the unexamined life of real people in real places is well worth filming.

Set in the unforgiving French industrial city of Lille, it's the story of two young working-class women and how they cope with lives that are neither dreamlike nor angelic. Isa (an indomitable and toothy Elodie Bouchez) is a 20-year-old vagabond (Dreamlife recalls the brilliant 1985 Agnès Varda film of that title in its subject matter and poetic authenticity) whose determination and generosity belie her waiflike appearance. New in town, wrestling a rucksack as large as herself down a bleak and misty street, she discovers that the acquaintance with whom she planned to crash moved out months ago. So she cuts pictures from magazines to make into greeting cards to sell to strangers -- a pitiful-seeming resort that she pulls off with pluck and optimism.

Indirectly, this gets her a job at a sweatshop sewing clothes, a gig that proves as comically disastrous as Lucille Ball's at the chocolate factory. But it puts her in touch with Marie (a melancholy and explosive Natacha Régnier), a woman her own age who lets her move into the large apartment she's housesitting. Rarely has the chemistry of women's friendship been depicted with such spontaneity and conviction. Isa, the extrovert, draws Marie into impulsive adventures and opportunities. Although seemingly more phlegmatic than her roommate, Marie ultimately commits herself with more ardor and, perhaps, self-destructiveness.

Bored and idle on a night off, Isa talks Marie into trying to crash the gate at a rock concert. They don't get in, but they do strike up a relationship with a pair of leather-clad, beer-swilling bouncers -- truculent and taciturn Fredo (Jo Prestia), with whom Isa hooks up, and obese but sensitive Charly (Patrick Mercado), whose lover Marie bemusedly becomes.

Outgoing though Isa is, she remains standoffish, accepting Fredo's money but not his affection. Marie proves more passionate, not only with Charly but with Chriss (Grégoire Colin), an arrogant and selfish restaurateur whom Isa picked out from the crowd to introduce to Marie as a lark. Their relationship is sadomasochistic and doomed, a pas de deux of willfully misdirected female innocence and opaque male selfishness reminiscent of Robert Bresson's Une femme douce.

Equally dead-end is Isa's relationship -- not with Fredo, but with the teenage girl who once lived in their apartment. The victim of an auto accident that killed her mother, she's hospitalized and in a coma. Isa reads her diary and feels compelled to visit her, bonding with the comatose girl in a way that she cannot with the moody and conflicted Marie. The girl's diary becomes Isa's as she begins making entries, filling in the owner's empty pages with her own life.

This device partly shapes the raw material of Dreamlife, which magically evokes the commonplace complications of real life with its cinéma-vérité style, its seemingly improvised performances, its protean narrative, and its keen eye for the mundane but telling detail. It connects the precisely observed and enacted dross of the everyday to a deeper or higher realm of destiny and beauty -- the element that both Isa and Marie know is missing from their lives and that they are driven to find. But as their lives and their relationship deteriorate, they turn on each other, clutching desperately to the one-sided obsessions estranging them.

Ultimately it's Isa who's responsible for opening the eyes of the film's wayward dreamers, with at best ambivalent results. In the end, Zonca falters from his realist rigor and forgoes the note-perfect characterizations for melodrama and glib social commentary. It's a small failing in a film that restores faith in the medium's gift for reconciling life and dreams with the grace of an angel.