In The Dreamlife Of Angels, director Erick Zonca's rough-hewn, searing debut, Élodie Bouchez and Natacha Régnier (deserving Best Actress co-winners at last year's Cannes Film Festival) play young, working-class women who share an intimate but extremely volatile friendship: They meet over the buzzsaw shriek of sewing machines in a dreary French industrial town and soon take a flat together, both living hand-to-mouth, but with vastly different temperaments. Bouchez, a vagabond who hauls her few possessions around in a rucksack, is nonetheless compassionate and playfully optimistic; Régnier, caustic and world-weary, rages over class injustices, yet finds herself drawn into a self-destructive affair with a rich club owner (Grégoire Colin). The Dreamlife Of Angels captures the subtle evolution of their uneasy relationship, which begins with giddy camaraderie (a scene in which they audition for a job at Planet Hollywood is especially funny) and slowly unravels. Zonca's strikingly organic use of cinema-verite style collects telling snippets from their lives and builds, almost imperceptibly, to a stunning conclusion. Socially conscious, actor-driven, and resolutely minor, The Dreamlife Of Angels may be derived from a familiar French prototype, but Zonca's attention to minor observational detail—sometimes at the expense of dramatic momentum—gives his film a special resonance. Not until the unforgettable final shot does the full impact of the story snap, devastatingly, into focus.
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