The Dreamlife of Angels

La vie rêvée des anges

France

1998

113 Min

Color

1.66:1

French

Currently 3.7/5 Stars.
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SCR Erick Zonca, Roger Bohbot, Virginie Wagon, Pierre Chosson

DP Agnès Godard, Dominique Le Rigoleur

CAST Élodie Bouchez, Natacha Régnier, Grégoire Colin, Patrick Mercado, Jo Prestia, Francine Massenhave, Živko Niklevski, Murielle Colvez, Louise Motte, Juliette Richevaux, Stéphanie Delerue, Christian Cailleret

Cannes (In Competition): Best Actress, Telluride, Toronto (Contemporary World Cinema), San Sebastián (Zabaltegi-New Directors), New York (Closing Night), Edinburgh (Closing Night), AFI FEST (World Cinema), Rotterdam (Main Programme), Karlovy Vary (French Regional Film), Stockholm (Competition), BAFICI

Synopsis

In Lille, two penniless young women with few prospects become friends. Isa moves in with Marie, who’s flat-sitting for a mother and child in hospital in comas following a car crash. Isa is out-going, unskilled, with hopes of moving south to warmer climes. Marie usually is either angry or detached. Then, while Isa begins to visit the child in whose flat they live, going to hospital to read to her, Marie slowly falls for a rich youth. At first Marie keeps him at bay, then she not only pursues him, she begins to dream he is her life’s love. When Isa tries to warn Marie, their friendship flounders. How will Marie handle the inevitable? And once they lose the flat, where will they go? —IMDb

Director

Erick Zonca

Erick Zonca (born September 10, 1956, in Orléans, France) is a French film director, best known for his critically acclaimed, award-winning 1998 feature film debut The Dreamlife of Angels. The film won the Best Actress award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. His first films were the shorts Rives (1992), Eternelles (1995), and Seule (1997). Zonca’s second feature was Le Petit Voleur (The Little Thief) (1999). His most recent, Julia (2008), based on John Cassavetes’ 1980 movie Gloria, starred Tilda Swinton and was shot in California and Mexico. —Wikipedia

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DT

15Mar13

Zonka’s stark dose of social realism paints in quick procession the post-EU paradigm: of a cross-continent underclass of economic disparity; its pretense of social mobility sharply rebuked by his two ‘angels’, and their prospectless navigating, succumbing to the burgeoning socio-economic landscape, in a last-ditch show of solidarity. In so doing, expressing solidarity with Dardenne, Loach, while invariably tumultuous - not least emblazoned in one angel’s choice between kindred worker and exploitative manager; a surfeit to the polemic.