"Who finds in life what they
dream?"

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Who finds in life what they dream? This emotionally moving film will
look into that and will also examine the heartaches of two working-class
girls, doing it in a way only the French can do it justice.

The petite 21-year-old Isa (for Isabelle) who is loaded down with
a full backpack, wanders into the cold and grey industrial city of Lille.
She hopes to stay with a male friend, but finds out he's in Belgium and
ends up remaining in Lille for the night. She hopes to pick up some cash
by selling hand-made touristy postcards on the street, which leads to an
encounter with a Yugoslavian who tells her about a sewing job in a clothing
factory. Isa, being unskilled, gets fired after working there only one
day but not before meeting a fellow seamstress, Marie (Regnier), who is
the same age.

Isa is someone we think we know but really don't, as she is prone
to be friendly and willing to make fast relationships by opening her dark
saucer eyes wide and offering an engaging smile showing her milky white
teeth to go along with her warm personality and trim look of close-cropped
black hair; but, we are, also, distracted by a mysterious scar she has
on her right eyebrow, which is never explained. There are many things about
Isa that are unexplained that we accept from her because she is so genuinely
likable and makes us feel comfortable being around her.

Marie reluctantly puts her up in her beautiful apartment, one that
she is minding for both a mother and a daughter lying comatose in the hospital
after a car crash. The mother will die, leaving the teenage girl with no
visitors except for Isa who takes it upon herself to make contact with
the girl in the hospital. These encounters brilliantly show what Isa is
all about, as she wants to will the girl back to life. For Isa life holds
so much promise and light and love in it, that misery alone cannot stop
her thoroughly from the angelic path she is on. The journey becomes for
her only a question if her dreamlife can become her real life as she will
seek the ideal and not be deterred by what roadblocks stand in her way,
which is something the young can do more readily than the elderly. By the
end of the film we wonder what will become of her as the camera pans the
sad faces of the women who work all their lives in a factory, where Isa
might have no choice but to end up. It is a place where she, too, will
be exploited by the bosses, as it seems that is the pattern of life for
a working girl here.

Isa's relationship with Marie is not a very warm one, instead it
is a workable one. Marie is not a trusting or caring person; in fact, she
is most of the time a downer who expects the worst in life and when that
happens she can't properly handle it without going crazy.

The tall and slender Marie is very attractive, but she is also very
mixed-up emotionally. Sex is the only thing that can bring her joy in this
world. Her relationship with the more spiritually minded Isa is based more
on convenience than on mutual admiration or anything else, since they are
both impoverished and seem to be stuck because of their lack of education
and inability to fit into society. They are seemingly trapped by their
low birth, unable to get what they want from life. Each one dreams of a
way out; but, Isa, as hard as it is to believe from her appearance, is
the one more grounded in reality, the one better prepared to make a go
of it in life and she is the one who grows up right in front of us.

Their encounter with the opposite sex comes on their first night
out together as they try to crash a rock concert without having a ticket,
but two rough looking bouncers keep them out while flirting with them.
The girls are not attracted to the guys and tell them so in a nasty way,
but the relationship changes to one of friendship after much banter back
and forth. Marie ends up going out with the one she insultingly called
fat, Charly (Mercado), and sleeps with him but tells him she doesn't like
him enough to have sex with him (she will have sex with him twice, on later
occasions); while the other bouncer, Fredo (Prestia), is smitten with the
cute Isa, but she is not taken with him and does not encourage the relationship
to go any further than friendship. The guys feel sorry for the penniless
girls; also, they want to keep up a relationship with them, so they give
them some money to help them out.

The supposed meal ticket and way out of the economic trap Marie is
in comes about unexpectedly as she gets caught shoplifting a leather jacket
and meets again Chriss (Colin), whom she met once before under unfriendly
circumstances. Chriss pays for the jacket, which she accepts with hostility.
Marie is someone who is terribly concerned about appearances and of being
humiliated, and is constantly unhappy about her station in life. Chriss
will turn out to be a womanizer and she will be one more girl in his series
of conquests, but she is too blinded by her own dreams to see this. His
nightclub (his father bought it for him) happens to be the place where
the girls' bouncer friends work.

Isa, in need of money, tucks in her pride and takes on the temp job
of dressing like a fool, putting on roller-skates and advertising sandwich-boards.
Marie, however, will not. She can't handle the demeaning nature of the
job.

A steady rift grows between the women, as Marie thinks she's got
what she wants with her relationship with Chriss and doesn't need Isa anymore
and acts hostile toward her. All Isa is trying to do is clue her friend
into not falling for Chriss, telling her that he will only drop her when
he wants to, but these remarks only make Marie more insulting towards her.
There's a look of disgust on the face of Isa that seems to be saying, you
are really sick. Isa finally realizes that she has to move on from here.

The performances of the two actresses was bewitching, as the two
women deservedly shared Best Actress honors last year at Cannes.

The poignancy and merits of the film are in depicting accurately
the reality of the girls' lives. It is a film without one false note of
sympathy
or sentimentality in it. This is not the type of a girl-buddy movie as
seen in some Hollywood films of late, filled with glibness and glitter
and canned experiences. Here, what happens has the ring of truth to it.
It is powerful in the sense that its simple telling of the tale, without
trying to be cute or pedantic, turns out to be profound.

This debut film for the 42-year-old director, done with austerity
and with the guile of a master reminiscent of someone like a Robert Bresson,
is a work of considerable merit. It is a film that not only depicted the
shattering of a friendship and a realistic look at life for the working
class, but it probed into the deep-seated loneliness found within each
of the girls. It did it by looking at their lives in a poetic way.