Amazon.co.uk Review
Moving, empathic and ultimately as teasingly mysterious as the radiant smile of its star Elodie Bouchez,
The Dream Life of Angels is a gritty portrait of two girls living on the margins of French society who meet in a garment-industry sweatshop near Lille. Flat-sitting, or maybe squatting, the home of a mother and daughter who are in hospital in comas after a car crash, for most of the film Isa and Marie are either doing crap, cash-in-hand menial jobs or unemployed after Isa, played by Bouchez, gets sacked and Marie, played by Natacha Régnier, quits out of sympathy. But director Erick Zonca (who was once a dishwasher in one of Martin Scorsese's favourite restaurants in New York) isn't out to make a patronising portrait of what it feels to be run over by life. His touch is feather-light, and ultimately this is a film about people, not statistics. It's much more a study of female friendship; the fragility of emotional connections and the pain love reaps.
Zonca's nimble, 16mm camera makes the film feel extraordinarily light on its feet, his little jump-cuts in the middle of scenes adding skips. Altogether, it's an almost balletic piece of cinema. He wrote the film specifically for Bouchez, and in scene after scene he lingers lovingly on her, holding on her image for a second or two more than seems strictly necessary. The name of the movie is teasingly oblique, but despite her fetching eyebrow scar and scruffy jumpers, Isa has an ethereal quality that allies her with the heavenly bodies of the title, albeit with a backpack instead of wings. In fact, it's the bravery of the script, its refusal to spell things out for us, to let us draw our own conclusions from selective cinematic snapshots like the pretty pictures Isa cuts out of magazines to sell as cards, which makes this film such a winner. --Leslie Felperin
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