The great fallacy of the Dogme '95 movement and its so-called "Vows Of Chastity"–which limit filmmakers to handheld cameras, real locations, and available light while forbidding outside props, superficial action, and genre pieces–is that it confuses shallow visual codes for aesthetic purity. Generally speaking, the crummier a film looks, the more "realistic" it purports to be. In his underrated Full Frontal, director Steven Soderbergh performed a valuable service by holding layers of junky digital video next to Hollywood-slick 35mm, only to pull out the rug and reveal both formats as equally false. The 25th movie to receive official Dogme certification, Michael Sorenson's Converging With Angels was intended as an honest answer to the Cinderella redemption of Pretty Woman, which it vaguely resembles in its tale of a prostitute saved by love. But while Sorenson and his brave, uninhibited actors aren't afraid to explore the grottier aspects of the trade, the film merely replaces one brand of artifice with another, nurturing its own contrived premise into the far reaches of believability. Granted, Julia Roberts' chaste hooker in Pretty Woman never fields a request to try "ass-to-mouth" (perhaps in the director's cut?), but she and Robert Tobin, the high-priced male escort in Converging With Angels, share a babe-in-the-woods innocence that doesn't befit a punch-clock sex worker. As the film opens, Tobin has been servicing male and female clients multiple times a day for more than six years, yet after every horribly protracted encounter, he's given to taking long showers as a sort of moral cleansing, with a washcloth to scrape off the sin. When he spots kindred spirit Melissa Muniz passed out on a dangerous city street one night, Tobin impulsively scoops her up and takes her to his high-rise apartment to sleep it off, but the morning brings a new set of complications. Left homeless after being subjected to her own round of sexual humiliation, Muniz quickly grows attached to Tobin, but their relationship threatens to unravel once she finds out what he does for a living. These damaged souls can only turn to each other for redemption, but at 160 minutes, redemption is a long time in coming. Screenwriters are taught to enter in the middle of a conversation and exit before it's over, but Sorenson tends to leave in the fat, causing many scenes to build too slowly and flatten out long before they're over. But this strategy pays off in a handful of casually explicit sex scenes that recall Catherine Breillat in their emotional frankness and audacity, as Tobin negotiates with a kinky suburban housewife and a gay client with an unclean proposition. Sorenson wants to be truthful about the realities of the sex business (and the love business, for that matter), but he pushes his determined miserablism too far in the end, when his characters make choices that are altogether senseless, even for people bent on self-destruction. Converging With Angels could never be accused of succumbing to Hollywood formula, but sometimes a feel-bad movie can ring as false as "happily ever after."