Another movie night chez Pete, and the showing was another French movie, La Vie revée des anges (in English, The Dreamlife of Angels). I have to say right off, one of the things I really like about this movie, and maybe about furrin movies in general, is that the people look real. You know, the people I generally see on sitcoms or on magazine covers look good until I try to imagine them in real life, and then they just look ridiculous. I could totally see Isa, Marie, Charlie, or Chris on the street, maybe not in the USA but certainly in France. People had scruffy hair and purplish eyes.
By the way, one of the characters was named Fredo. My mind kept on wanting to make him Frodo, so it's a good thing he looked nothing at all like a Hobbit.
The story centers around two young women named Isa (short for Isabelle) and Marie. Isa is an optimistic go-getter who has trouble finding long-term work but who doesn't shirk at selling handmade cards on the street if she has to. With all her possessions on her back, she travels to Lille (a heavily industrial city almost on the Belgian border - see this topographic map of France if interested) to stay with a friend, who had run off to Belgium in the meantime. She manages to get a job in a clothes factory and, on her first day there, befriends a woman named Marie. Marie consents to let Isa stay in the apartment where she is living, and thus begins their friendship.
Like Isa, Marie has trouble finding work, but she is too proud to admit to needing anything, including a job. She won't take any work that she thinks is beneath her, she won't work towards anything she might want, and she lashes out violently and irrationally at anyone who criticizes her. She's also locked in a pattern of victimization; she can't see any way to live other than to be on top or on the bottom of a relationship.
I don't want to tell much more of the story, because I don't want to ruin it for anyone else. I'm just really struck by the complete juxtaposition of these two young women. Isa is an eternal optimist, taking any honest work that comes to her, never saying no to an opportunity. Okay, she's not completely honest (she tells people the cards she's selling are for charity), but at least she's not just sitting on a street corner begging for change. (Marie's reaction: I don't beg.
) She sees no harm in asking, even if she figures the answer is probably no, and she takes her knocks and moves on. Although she's an opportunist, she's also generous and caring, spending her days by the bedside of a comatose teenager in whose home she's living. (This generosity of spirit possibly explains why Fredo, who has a thing for Isa, gives her money even though she told him honestly that she wouldn't sleep with him.) Marie, on the other hand, constantly tells Isa scornfully that everything she does is stupid and pointless. Marie is unable to move her own life forward, to create meaning for herself, only to tear other people down.
Some particularly astute readers may be able to ascertain where this is going. I won't say any more, other than that the movie makes a perfectly clear statement about which kind of person it's better to be. Although I don't like Marie very much, I feel sorry for her, and I wonder whether it would have been possible to do anything for her, to get her out of her cycle of self-loathing and victimization. If she were given a hope to help herself, would she have taken it, or would she have scorned it, out of pride or perhaps out of fear that she might have to face her demons?
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