You get a lot of angels in America. As plot devices, angels are more twee than unicorns, but that doesn't stop directors from cramming them into movies. One could make up a list of worst angel movies ever: Pay it Forward (just for including the deadly song "Calling All Angels"), Michael with John Travolta, the remake of The Bishop's Wife -- occasionally I can tolerate them. No old Marvel Comics fan could hate this Rubens painting of St. Michael serving Lucifer an eviction notice. And Tilda Swinton's Gabriel in Constantine is a memorably hostile misanthrope angel. Maybe it's inspired by this little slice of craziness from 1995, where Christopher Walken assayed the part of Gabriel ("I'm an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt.") And then there's the silver-toned angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, silent mourners at human suffering, hovering at that secular yet sacred place, the public library. But then there's one troubling matter, The Dream Life of Angels, Erick Zonca's French film from 1998 -- a most subtle explanation of how the divine works in everyday life.
No one ever talks about retiring to the north of France. The Dream Life of Angels begins in Lille, a small and uninteresting industrial town not too far from the Belgian frontier. In wanders the vagabond Isabelle, called "Isa" (Elodie Bouchez), dwarfed by her own backpack. She wears half-unraveled sweaters, and has a jagged gouge out of her right eyebrow. Isa had a sort of invitation to stay on the roach-coach of her ex-lover, but he's off in Belgium with no forwarding address. She helps herself to the truck as a crash pad; the following day she goes off to raise some money for her few needs of fast food and hand-rolled cigarettes. She sells greeting cards that she makes herself, telling some little lies about how the money is going to charity. One of her customers gives her a seamstress job, which doesn't last long. While she's there she meets the pretty but hard-faced blonde Marie (Natacha Regnier), who allows her to stay at her flat.
The two become buddies, but there's always a divide between them. "You dream a lot," says Marie. Isa takes it as a compliment, she has enough spare time to check into the origin of the flat at which they're house-sitting; it's the home of a girl who is in a coma after a car crash. Isa makes it her sort of hobby to read the ailing girl's diary, and to visit her in the hospital. In the mean time, Marie sleeps with the no-good Chris (Gregoire Colin), the princeling owner of a local nightclub. He has a profile like Rudolph Valentino, and he knows it, and he loves to flaunt it; Marie falls ruinously in love. Your stomach turns over watching Marie's tough, wary face dissolve into a sheepish smile when he's near. Caring for two women, one dead to the world, the other dead to logic, Isa wins one and loses one.
There's something about these lowlands, this small, fog-shrouded quadrant of the world, that provides the best spiritual movies in Europe. In Lille, the main character in Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest learns that he's dying of cancer ... consumed from the inside-out by his loneliness, and his concern for his parish. Lille is also only about 150 miles from Seraing in Belgium, the domain of the Dardenne brothers, whose angel-free films are all battlegrounds for souls under siege.
On one level, Zonca's film is an acute portrait of the catch-as-catch-can life, and the two squabbling, scrabbling girls might be cousins of Maggie and Hopi in the Hernandez Brothers' Love and Rockets comics. If there is an angelic life --- and these believe it or don't stats say most Americans believe in the winged pests -- they must be unworldly, unfamiliar with humanity and its more selfish urges. Describing the scrubby Isa as an angel might be a euphemism, but as Isa, Bouchez's optimism and generosity reminds us of some people we might have met along the way, people who are in a natural state of grace. Sometimes they've been dirty, alcoholic, ill-read, or even deluded. But they had something in them that was selfless, bigger than life; maybe one definition of "sacred" is those immune to common sense, for better or for worse.
