Review: The Dreamlife of Angels (1998)
Edwin Jahiel
THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS (LA VIE REVEE DES ANGES, France, 1998) *** 1/2
Directed by Erick Zonca. Script & dialogues, Zonca, Roger Bohbot, Virginie
Wagon. Photography, Agnes Godard. Editing, Yannick Kergoat. Sets, Jimmy
Vansteenkist. Music,Yann Thiersen. Cast: Elodie Bouchez (Isa), Natacha
Regnier (Marie), Gregoire Colin (Chriss), Jo Prestia (Fredo), Patrick
Mercado (Charly). A Bagheera production (Paris). A Sony Pictures Classic
release. 113 minutes. Rated R (sex)
It's a French film. A very good French film. A very French French film.
And, to boot, a first feature by a Frenchman, then 42, with a rather
unusual name that more often than not misspelled: Eric, Erik, Erick,
Zonka, Zoncka, Zonca. His background is unusual too. Born in Orleans in
1956, while still in high-school he decided to become a filmmaker. He moved
to Paris at age 16, discovered American cinema, took acting lessons,
survived via odd jobs. At age 20 he moved to New York, spent three years
there, survived via odd jobs, married a dancer from the Merce Cunningham
Company, took more acting classes, discovered European (including, very
much, French classical cinema). Back to Paris for two years' study of
philosophy and more odd jobs. At age 30 he entered movies as an apprentice.
He then became an assistant, later directed TV documentaries and, beginning
in 1992, three short films, all successful on the festival circuit. But
glory seldom comes from shorts.
It arrived with a bang when Dreamlife and its makers received a slew of
nominations at the 1998 Cannes Festival, where its two protagonists shared
the Best Actress prize. Ms Bouchez, a veteran of many films, is in
increasing demand, and was in another, very good film at Cannes, also a
first feature called Louise (Take 2). Ms Regnier is a newcomer. At the 1999
Cesar awards (French Oscars), the movie was Best French Film, Elodie
Bouchez Best Actress, Natacha Regnier Most Promising Actress. At the
European Film Awards, Mr. Zonca won as European Discovery of the Year, the
two ladies as Best Actresses. At the Viennale, the movie was The
International Critics Association's choice.
Dreamlife has no plot by Hollywood standards. A penniless drifter, the
rather petite 21-year old Isa (for Isabelle), carrying all her possessions
in a huge backpack, wanders into the industrial city of Lille in Northern
France. She hopes to stay with a male friend, finds out he's left town,
somehow spends a cold night in Lille (there are tiny clues that it is the
post- Christmas season). Her attempt to pick up some francs by making
postcards from magazine pictures leads to a casual encounter (a marvelous
Yugoslav who has a daughter her age) who finds her a sewing job in a
minimum wage clothing factory. Isa's skills being zero, she gets quickly
fired, but not before meeting a co-worker, Marie, also 21.
Hesitantly, Marie puts up Isa in "her" good apartment, one that she is
minding for a mother and a daughter who, after a car crash, are comatose in
a hospital. By degrees, Isa and Marie form a friendship--in fact more
camaraderie than affection-- though having impecunity in common are
otherwise different from each other. Isa, who flashes generously her big ,
dark eyes and a sunny, toothy smile (Ms Bouchez's trademark), is adaptable
and comfortable with her ambulatory life. We learn only little about her
past. A scar over an eyebrow (apparently put there at Bouchez's suggestion)
keeps catching our eye and making us wonder how it got there? Violence
against Isa? A tomboy accident?
Pretty unsinkable and optimistic, she recalls a bit Godard's My Life to
Live, in which Nana (Anna Karina), forced to survive through prostitution,
still thinks that life can be beautiful. But unlike Godard, Erick Zonca
will not analyze, philosophize, expatiate or ask the incessant questions
that hallmark Godard's work. Dreamlife is entirely "what you see is what
you get."
There's also a strong, loving streak in Isa. She discovers and reads, in
the apartment, the diary of Sabine, the daughter. Next thing you know, she
is visiting regularly the vegetable-like Sabine at the hospital (the mother
had died) where she speaks to her as if in the belief that this will help
her get well. It's a wonderfully touching invention .
At the other extreme, slender, taller Marie is are rebel with a huge,
misanthropic chip on her shoulder. (It is later explained partly by her
background, partly as the not unusual dissatisfaction among the French
working class). Isa, strictly from hunger yet laughingly takes on the very
temp job of dressing ridiculously (in the cold street), putting on
roller-skates and advertising sandwich-boards. Marie, however will not. She
is not amused. She thinks, correctly but impractically, that this is
demeaning work. She is always very conscious of the humiliations of life.
Yet she's also capable of fun and games.
Trying to crash ticketless a rock-concert, the girls are blocked by two
tough-looking bouncers (and bikers), thin Fredo and corpulent Charly. What
starts as antagonism ends up as sweet friendship, which extends to Marie
sleeping--but not having an affair --with Charly. She's keeping her options
open.
The main option comes in the person of Chriss (sic), a young man who is
what the French call "papa's son," a spoiled fellow whose family has bought
him a night-club (the very one where the bouncers work) and more. What
really matters here is that Chriss is a cad. When Marie is caught
shoplifting, he rescues her. In spite of her hostility extending also to
him, she yields, goes to bed with Chriss, begins a short-lived but
calamitous relationship which is punctuated by very real humiliations,
which is never explained, in which stages of abandon alternate with stages
of clenched teeth. One thing is fairly clear: that Marie herself does not
know what she feels except that the wealthy man will be her ticket out of
misery. How naive.
The Chriss business puts a wedge between the girls. Isa, who at first
seemed to be a lightweight in the brains department, proves to be
realistic, perspicacious and anxious to open Marie's eyes to her
self-destruction. It all falls on deaf, hostile ears...
The movie is beautifully made in all respects, and with a strong sense of
economy of means. Photography is done smoothly with super-16 cameras which
allow for flexibility, the following of characters, and a near-documentary
look. Style, script, editing, acting, real sets too are under the sign of
economy as well as palpable intimacy in the collaboration of all involved.
The film is not manufactured, instead, it records life. It also bucks the
contemporary trend of movies begetting movies, of the past-
movies-awareness that was the gift to us by the French New Wave but went on
to become mere fashion (viz. Tarantino and hordes of Sundance-ish films).
Here movie-consciousness does not replace life-consciousness. There are no
riffs on past pictures. Yet Dreamlife is eminently French.
For one thing, it is character and relationship oriented. For another, it
deals with the working class, which diversely gets labeled as proletarian,
blue-collar or low-class. The paradox (a staple of French cinema), is that
the rich, petty bourgeois Chriss is in reality very low-class ethically.
Clearly too, the classic French cinema that Mr. Zonca paradoxically
discovered in New York, has marked him. He updates the "poetic realism" of
(mostly) the 1930s with its stream of "Popular Front" movies that
celebrated loners among the common men and women, that had their own streak
of "miserabilism," and that never quite came to a halt. Witness some of
Robert Bresson's works and, even closer to our day, Agnes Varda's Odyssey
of a female drifter in Vagabond (1985).
" Le mauvais gout mene au crime" (Stendhal)
Edwin Jahiel's movie reviews are at http://www.prairienet.org/ejahiel