The Dreamlife of Angels (1998)

42-year-old Erick Zonca first gained international success with this chronicle of a tenuous friendship between two young women in northern France. Élodie Bouchez and Natacha Régnier shared the Best Actress award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival for their work as the two directionless girls, who find romance and meager work as the situations arise. Zonca uses the two characters as representatives of the kinds of positive and negative emotional choices that affect people for the rest of their lives: while Bouchez's Isa shows an affinity for neglected, sensitive souls like herself, Régnier's Marie deepens her wounds by taking up with men who reinforce her low sense of self-worth. Régnier's short-fused performance commands immediate attention, but it's Bouchez's delicate, reserved compassion that makes the film worth seeing. Zonca is an affectionate but distanced director; events in the film occur with an unhurried authenticity. Though the film's technical achivements are minimal -- the jump cuts, hand-held camerawork, and improvised feel are all lifted from the French New Wave -- its weighty emotional content and the compelling screen presence of the two leads made it something of an art-house sensation. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide