MOVIE REVIEW : ‘It Was a Wonderful Life’: A Rich Look at Homelessness : Seven women who don’t fit the stereotype are profiled in a caring and unsettling documentary that serves as a consciousness-raiser.

Michelle Ohayon’s “It Was a Wonderful Life” (Saturdays and Sundays at the Monica 4-Plex at 11 a.m.) introduces us to seven women who belong to what the filmmaker calls the invisible homeless. These women do not sleep in doorways, or ask for handouts; two of them are so chic that you would never in a million years suspect them of being homeless. They are all intelligent, articulate women who have known security and, in some instances, even wealth.

This is what makes Ohayon’s caring and informative documentary such a terrific consciousness-raiser, for if these women could wind up on the street, so could we. It’s all too easy to shut ourselves off from most homeless victims who haunt our cities, but it is virtually impossible not to identify with Ohayon’s interviewees. In becoming involved with them, Ohayon invites us to think of all the homeless.

Through the women’s stories, underlined by a barrage of jarring statistics--we get a crystal-clear picture of some of our society’s wrongs. Ohayon tells us a lot we already know but her synthesis gives fresh impact to the plight of the homeless. She suggests forcefully the following: Too many women--and their children--are made vulnerable by divorce, the victims of “deadbeat dads” who disappear to avoid paying child support and alimony. Too frequently government agencies designed to help them are too understaffed, underfunded and often burdened with too much red tape to be very effective.

The challenges that face all homeless people: How do you keep looking good in order to land a job? What do you use for an address or phone number? How do you ward off danger and loneliness? These problems seem intensified for women both by ageism and sexism. Furthermore, we learn time and again that the usual requirement of the first and last month’s rent, plus a security deposit, can make housing unaffordable even when a homeless person does land a job.

That’s the case with Lou, a 37-year-old waitress at a landmark Hollywood restaurant who lives for periods in a rented U-Haul truck and other times camps out in the mountains. She was doing just fine until a serious illness wiped out her savings. Josephine, an elegant painter who once lived in Malibu and had servants, lives in her car, as do Jeanette, a law student with a young son, and the middle-aged Marie and the elderly Alice (who refuses to be interviewed on camera).

Terry and her three children live in a motel room--for now--and Reena, once a successful singer, is about to be evicted from her home of 17 years because of the seeming impossibility of enforcing a court order mandating support from the long-absent husband who urged her to give up her career to raise their six children.

One of Ohayon’s most telling interviews is with a female Santa Monica parking enforcement officer seen ticketing a homeless woman’s car. No, she doesn’t like doing it, but it’s part of the job. A single mother with children, she says, “I have two jobs to keep off the street. I’m just a paycheck away from being homeless myself.”

Ohayon could easily have wrapped up her film in short order but instead she wisely stretched out her shooting schedule over a considerable period of time, allowing us to come to know and care about these women and also to start wondering what is going to happen to them by the time the film is over. Will there be any happy endings for any of them, and if so, who will be the lucky ones? It’s worth seeing this fine and unsettling film (Times-rated Mature for adult theme) to find out for yourself.

‘It Was a Wonderful Life’

A Cinewomen presentation. Director Michelle Ohayon. Producers Tamar E. Glaser, Ohayon. Cinematographers Theo Van de Sande, Jacek Laskus, Bruce Ready. Editors Anne Stein, Lisa Leeman. Music Melissa Etheridge. Sound Margaret Duke, Giovanni Di Simone. Running time: 1 hour, 19 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (for adult theme).