Returning to The Dreamlife of Angels
Begin with the name, but in French — La Vie rêvée des anges — where it sounds and looks much more beautiful, even from the age of crinoline with that circumflex and accent building rêvée into some antique façade. I took the rare course of buying a DVD when servers from San Francisco to Singapore might have easily quelled my need, but this film is not available on any streaming source in the US, though torrent I could. No matter, the DVD’s grain is vaguely apparent, if somewhat distant — a few generations from the print I saw in the spring of 1999 at the Bijou in Eugene, Oregon. At the time, I didn’t know what to expect, but I still remember walking out into the slow summer dusk a little wobbly and out of breath, reaching for something not there, before somehow ghostly coming against the nothing that did breathe. Roughly the same age as the two actresses, I’d gone alone, but came out bifurcated — one part expecting my life to continue in the same plainsong and the other grown newly red and vitreous, now tired of fantasies and ready to grab, to affront — even to succumb to debasement, if only I could do so under two human hands.
Still from La Vie rêvée des anges, 1998. ACID.
The major identifying factor in 1999 was Élodie Bouchez’s portrayal of Isa — and why I went to such a film in the first place had much to do with “seeing” that actress in André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds a few years before. Loneliness drove me to experience the vibrant yet reposed face ripped from a Renoir and pasted into the new but ending century, a spring spice. The film is about the two faces of the young women, so clearly delineated, one (Isa) giving and life-affirming, the other (Marie) broken and pressing the gas on her death-drive long before her last moment. On the new go-around I could see into my past, and, most especially, that anxious year 1999, now crystallized. I was very close to a young woman who fully embodied Isa: the foibles, the arts and crafts, the journaling, and the smiles, but who also inhabited the spectre of Marie in her need to separate and watch a wall. An initial passion between us stalled, but our college days dovetailed into a compulsion of compassion — a sibling moxie being more fruitful than randy fornication. It was not unlike the relations of the two young women — she often stayed over, even platonically sleeping in my bed to help rid herself of horrible insomnia. So it came to be that I watched something more finely grained than a simple emplacement of my history, with the tragic ending’s resonance in lived years holding enough hurtful splinters to even bloody old memories.
Élodie Bouchez in Wild Reeds, 1994. Télérama.
In twenty-one summers enough has come to pass so that when I read lines of W.S. Merwin —
Something I’ve not done
is following me
I haven’t done it again and again
so it has many footsteps
like a drumstick that’s grown old and never been used
— the possibilities for recognition are grown brittle and I often choose barricades to more poisonous confrontations. My existence has intersected with a number of suicides, many more than I ever would have dreamed of — therefore the tragedy of Marie going out the window isn’t as awing this latest time around. The act is not quite just (as it should be), but director Erick Zonca well prepares for such an action to be taken, even though Marie does not appear in the twelve minutes of screentime before her end, and the film instead focuses more on Isa and her continuing itinerancy. Isa devotes herself to the girl at the hospital in a coma, who seems on the brink of death, but miraculously pulls through, when “great thing of [the viewer] forgot”: Marie! She is still squatting in a suddenly very empty apartment she will soon lose anyway and is only seen sleeping for a second before her unfortunate end. Exactly thirty-five seconds transpire after the jump until the following future scene, only enough for Isa to look out the window and close her eyes, beginning her journey in the foothills of lifelong sorrow. The following short scene of her getting a job on an electronics assembly line milks nothing, but is instead a fierce conscription into Beckett’s celebrated I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
There is little to say after it happens — survivors of loved ones who kill themselves are often unified by the feelings of incompletion and speechlessness in the eerie aftermath. Aristotle defined the tragedy in art as “an imitation [mimēsis] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…” arousing pity and terror to effect the catharsis of these emotions. Some people require religion or service or drugs or fucking with others to bring about their catharsis, but I know where my honey is. Prufrock may have measured his life in coffee spoons, but I’ve used films and, later, books to endow the years, changing the past into something it might have or might not have been. I find a certain joy in aging, in lending different emotions to the vastnesses of experience accrued, with a focal range both blurring and sharpening in viewing films like this one and Mouchette and Cries and Whispers. Art, that great teacher, says to us, like Robert Frost’s most famous lines, “Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” And to creep further back into the 1800s, when we paid more attention to nature than art, Emerson wrote “You are one thing, but nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment.” But this must needs be revised today into: You might be forgotten by those who once loved you, but art is that one thing and the other thing, to make use of while you heal. //
Pierre-August Renoir, Portrait of Madame Alphonse Daudet, 1876. Oil on canvas. Web Gallery of Art.
Still from La Vie rêvée des anges, 1998. Le Grand Action.
Still from La Vie rêvée des anges, 1998. ACID.
