More disappointments

Blue Velvet (1986) wasn't quite weird enough for me. I guess I expected the kidnapping to turn out to have been much more complicated, like the story in Mulholland Dr. (2001), which I much preferred. Or has my weirdness quotient risen that much in the intervening years? Still, the DVD interviews with the cast were interesting.

Dead Heart (1996) was sort of conventional. I was disappointed because of reading the blurb on the box; I expected some kind of surprising revelation. It had some quasi-religious aboriginal stuff, and it occurred to me afterwards that there is very little Judeo-Christian religion in most American movies, which is odd when you think how religious Americans profess to be. But as an agnostic, I'm thankful for that.

If I hadn't watched the previews on the Nettoyage à sec (Dry Cleaning; 1997) DVD, I might have liked it more, but probably not. They telegraphed the message that this was going to be a gay-themed movie. And once again, even if it's arguably not openly critical of the bourgeoisie, it somehow presumes they're wrong or unhappy and is also aimed at shocking "bourgeois" sensibilities.

I'm at a loss to explain why I liked La Vie rêvée des anges (The Dreamlife of Angels, 1998). There was a certain among of stuff about class differences, even a line dismissing the night club in the movie as a "boîte à bourges" (a club for the bourgeoisie). I can also see why Mr Cranky complains about

writer/director Erick Zonca's misdirected compassion for the tribulations of everyday life of his two main characters.

What the French think is good cinema is the kind of stuff Americans see at shopping malls every day. You know, Pa Jones is yelling at the top of his lungs at Ma Jones because she's purchased the wrong brand of toilet paper. Basically, the reasonable person walks by this fiasco, embarrassed to be part of the same species as these people while the French line up at the theater to see the whole damn thing dramatized in film.

True,

"The prevalence of anguish and misery in French art films often seems as predictable and ridiculous as the feel-good optimism in Hollywood movies. And French director Erick Zonca's debut film, The Dreamlife of Angels, certainly has more than its share of grinding poverty, alienation, betrayal and depression....[But] scenes of daily life in the bars, streets and sweatshops, and especially the performances of the two leads themselves, are all so natural and convincing as to seem like the thing itself.

Sure enough, Erick Zonka "has a passion for young, marginalized characters who face the world alone and struggle, with mixed results, to improvise a means of survival." Another of his films is a "portrait of a working-class kid who, disgusted with his job in a bakery, opts out for a life of crime." And "At the end of Zonca's film, the camera moves along from Isa's bench in her new job to the faces of other young women stitching away like her....Well, society needs goods and these women need jobs; still, we're allowed to suspect that the world and the human race were not created in order to put these young lives at these machines. Also, several critics speak of sweatshops, even if the factories in the movie aren't ones in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions. One French critic complains that at the age depicted in the movie, young people who are instructed to be flexible, but just want to make a life for themselves on their own terms.

I don't get the title, either. A French Communist paper argues that the title fits the film very well, and concludes that the audience can dream along with the two main characters.

In an interview the director Erick Zonca clams that he modelled Isa on Elodie Bouchez, the actress who plays her, as he once saw her at a casting call carrying a backpack and a diary. (Things turned out pretty well for her, didn't they?) On the other hand, she herself found her role in the movie too nice, and said that she was sick of that kind of person. Anyway, all that suggests that she is one angel.

I suspected that the reason the film was so popular at the Cannes Film Festival was because it was about a marginalized sector of the working class beloved of the French intelligensia. Even if the Cannes Film Festival jury was headed by Martin Scorsese and included Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder, who aren't French awarded the two actresses, the film itself won France's Cesar for best film.

And I agree with this critic about Elodie Bouchez:

Frankly, exactly why her performance has captured the European critics on such a grand and unanimous scale is not completely obvious to me on the evidence of this film.

Bouchez does have a melancholy charm, and the movie is reasonably engrossing, with the look and feel of gritty authenticity. But why it has been singled out for such lavish praise is hard to figure.

I guess I found the characters sufficiently sympathetic and the telling of the story sufficiently attractive that I liked it, if not as much as the critics.