In This Evocative, Truthful Story, ‘Angels’ Indeed Walk Among Us

Frank, intimate, touching, with an emotional immediacy that is killing, Erick Zonca’s “The Dreamlife of Angels” draws its intensity and feeling from a pair of actresses whose portrait of a troubled friendship is as moving a collaboration as the year has seen.

Since the film’s Cannes debut, young stars Elodie Bouchez and Natacha Regnier have been showered with honors. They shared the best actress award at the festival, Bouchez won the Cesar (the French version of the Oscar) for best actress, Regnier the Cesar for best newcomer, and the film itself was named France’s best of the year.

All this from the assured feature debut of a 42-year-old director who has fashioned an empathetic portrait of the kind of aimless outsiders we perhaps pass every day, dispossessed young women living on the fringe of society, trying to construct a life out of the most flimsy material.

Bouchez (already a Cesar winner for Andre Techine’s “Wild Reeds” and an actress with the most open, enchanting smile) is Isa, a 21-year-old vagabond waif who arrives in the northern French city of Lille with her whole life in a knapsack. Resilient and game for anything, Isa has managed to retain her basically sweet nature despite having to cope with the perils of being on the road.

A chance encounter enables Isa to bluff her way into a job as a sewing machine operator in a clothing factory where Marie (Regnier), a sullen young wildcat with an attitude about everything, already works. Marie is house-sitting a large apartment belonging to a mother and daughter hospitalized after an auto accident, and soon Isa is sharing it with her.

These young women may be the angels of the title, but Zonca, careful not to idealize, doesn’t hesitate to portray them as unconcerned instigators and frequent troublemakers who are more pleased with themselves than they have objective reason to be.

Despite the wide difference between Marie’s furious stance and Isa’s gamin-like simplicity, Zonca prefers, at least at first, to concentrate on what these two have in common. In addition to their shared smug looks, neither young woman is as in control of her life as she imagines, and though they don’t realize it, fragility is as much a part of their makeup as toughness.

Marie and Isa also share an unspoken and unacknowledged longing to establish connections, and not necessarily romantic ones, to people outside themselves. The wary, gradual way in which these two become friends is one of “Dreamlife’s” many pleasures, and the astonishment Marie displays at actually having a soul mate is subtly but unmistakably conveyed.

With less of a chip on her shoulder, Isa relaxes completely into her new life. When she finds the journal of the hospitalized young person in whose room she’s staying, Isa’s search for connection leads her to visit the comatose girl and get tentatively involved in her rehabilitation.

Marie, on the other hand, is less accepting of what life offers her. Unlike Isa, she won’t think of applying for work as a waitress or walking around with an advertising sandwich board. She enters into a lethargic romance with an overweight but gentle club doorman named Charly (Patrick Mercado), but there is the sense that she is simply marking time, waiting for a prince to rescue her from her self-destructive fury.

Then Marie meets Chris (Gregoire Colin), the self-satisfied son of one of the town’s most successful restaurateurs. Marie, who like many untrusting people risks falling too hard when she lets her guard down, simultaneously resists Chris and wants him desperately. Her furtive vulnerability turns out, finally, to be more frightening than her hardest edge.

“The Dreamlife of Angels” focuses on how these outside connections affect Isa and Marie individually and impact their relationship with each other. It’s an exceptional rendition of a friendship that holds us by the grace and skill with which it re-creates the very shape and texture of reality.

Zonca, a former actor who co-wrote “Dreamlife’s” script with Roger Bohbot, has an impeccable sense of what’s natural and unaffected on screen, so much so that it never seems that what’s seen and heard began as words on a page. When Bouchez’s and Regnier’s honest and unguarded performances, captured in hand-held moments by cinematographer Agnes Godard, are added in, getting drawn into these unfocused, precariously balanced and heartbreaking lives is all but inevitable.

* MPAA rating: R, for some strong sexuality. Times guidelines: a brief but candid moment of sexual intercourse.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

‘The Dreamlife of Angels’

Elodie Bouchez: Isa

Natacha Regnier: Marie

Gregoire Colin: Chris

Jo Prestia: Fredo

Patrick Mercado: Charly

Released by Sony Pictures Classics. Director Erick Zonca. Producer Francois Marquis. Screenplay Erick Zonca & Roger Bohbot. Cinematographer Agnes Godard. Editor Yannick Kergoat. Costumes Francois Clavel. Art director Jimmy Vansteenkiste. Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes.

Selected theaters.