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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
The lovely French film "Dreamlife of Angels" manages to warm hearts without numbing minds.
Apr 5, 1999 | For those of us for whom French movies were a formative part of our moviegoing, there's been a special joy in seeing how, in the past few years, French filmmakers have sloughed off the petrified literary adaptations and star vehicles that had come to dominate the industry. But there was still the harshness of the new French movies to get used to. The lyricism that had characterized French film from the '30s through the nouvelle vague and even into the '70s seemed to have no place in movies attempting to capture the new face of France, with its changing racial makeup, the economic hardship and the diminished expectations of young people. Perhaps Claire Denis has been the filmmaker to best reconcile the seemingly opposing strains. In "I Can't Sleep," and less successfully in "Nenette et Boni," Denis has captured something like the village-in-a-city feel of '30s French film, even if today's villagers don't share each other's language. At times, though, the harshness of France's new social and economic realities seemed to have taken over the faces of the actors. Even in films where I admired the craftsmanship, like Benoit Jacquot's "A Single Girl" or some of the dramas of Olivier Assayas, I found it hard to care about the characters.
I can't imagine anyone not responding to Elodie Bouchez in Erick Zonca's "The Dreamlife of Angels." Her huge-eyed face topped by a shock of close-cropped black hair, her toothy smile and overbite making her lips seem even larger than they are, Bouchez's Isa is -- from our first glimpse of her trudging along the streets shouldering a rucksack almost as big as she is -- heartbreakingly open. A young drifter who works when she can and tries to get by selling homemade cards the rest of the time, Isa depends on the kindness of friends as well as strangers. She willingly puts her faith in people, and it's a measure of how uncynical Zonca's film is that Isa isn't a fool or a victim. The scar she carries on her right eyebrow suggests that she's known what people can be at their worst. Yet she doesn't expect the worst from the people she meets. In Lille, Isa meets Marie (Natacha Rignier), a girl her age whom she encounters in the clothing factory where she picks up a few days' work. Marie invites Isa to move in with her to the apartment she's minding. This home is as temporary as everything else about the girls' lives; the inhabitants, a mother and daughter, have been hospitalized after a car crash. But the night's shelter Marie offers Isa stretches to weeks, and the two settle into both their shared living space and a camaraderie.
"The Dreamlife of Angels" is, at its heart, a mystery story about the forces that draw people together and, bit by bit, pry them apart. Marie appears as closed off as Isa is open. Rignier (who bears a resemblance to model Stella Tennant) offers Zonca's camera a face that seems hard, suspicious and yet almost trembling with fragile defensiveness. Marie harbors vague dreams of the good life, though nothing much seems capable of bringing her pleasure. When she gets involved with a local hotshot a few years older than she is, a coldhearted bastard of a club owner (Gregoire Colin, whose blankness worked against him as the lead in "Nenette et Boni" but who is perfectly cast here), the attraction is only partly what his money can offer her. Marie is just as turned on by the way his unfeeling use of her confirms her own feelings of worthlessness. (Zonca made cuts in the bedroom scenes after the European version earned the film an NC-17 from the subcretins of the MPAA ratings board.) For all the resentments she harbors and all she does to keep people on the outside, Marie is completely unprotected. When she and Isa audition for a job at a cafe where the waitresses are supposed to dress as stars, her hostile embarrassment exposes her to humiliation while Isa's game, laughing imitation of Madonna brings out the ridiculousness of the whole enterprise.
