THE DREAM LIFE OF ANGELS Directed by Erick Zonca Starring Eloise Bouchez, Natacha Regnier

Sometimes you think critics across the board have loved The Dream Life of Angels because it would be such a bummer for director Erick Zonca, a really nice, hardworking guy, if they didn't. The eminently decent Zonca has said that he'd wanted to make a big-screen feature since age 14, but he never felt he had the "cultural background" or the know-how. Cultural background?? How could anyone pan this guy? If only more directors had such tender misgivings!

The title suggests an almost puzzling degree of transcendence, particularly for a film so grounded in the nitty-gritty of day-to-day existence and friendship. But we can call this depiction of straightforward humanity transcendent if we consider the implicitly condescending subhumanity of much schlock oh, the heady effluvia of Hollywood's dream factory.

That sounds snobbish, and indeed Dream Life could be slotted as the most typical of art-house flicks anyway: marginal lifestyles, some authentic yelling, ambling plot and well-deployed shakiness of production values.

But, barring a debatable ending, Dream of Life actually does stick. Perhaps it's because the characters, Isa (Eloise Bouchez) and Marie (Natacha Regnier), don't ask anything of us, aren't playing to us. They're not even always likable: Isa's rough-and-readiness can quickly acquire a shrill, desperate edge, and Marie is generally painful to watch. The two live in an apartment Marie (somewhat unofficially) looks after; the owners all perished except for a comatose girl, whose diary captivates Isa. Both in their early 20s, both living hand to mouth, perpetually between jobs, they strike up a friendship whose ups and downs are here faithfully and skillfully recorded.

Having drifted into each other's orbit, the two soon experience outside pulls. Isa acquires a morbid interest in the comatose girl, whose tragedy allows awed and then self-righteous absorption. Marie clings far too long to a rich, womanising slickster (Gregoire Colin as Chris) who sees a needfulness he can prise open into a raw gaping masochistic dependence. Reading faces, you might judge Isa the worse off, with chipped-tooth and scar-bifurcated eyebrow, but you realize nervewracking and nervous Marie has borne a more interior brand of wear and tear.

Let's not forget Charly (Patrich Mercado) and Fredo (Jo Prestia), two bouncer/bikers with whom Marie and Isa at first spar and then hang out. Sensitive and self-conscious Charly especially is not your stereotypical biker whose modified muffler leaves city canyons quaking. The somewhat roly-poly fellow somberly and touchingly informs Marie that he knows many people are turned off by his weight. Even when the two bikers are pressing rolled-up francs into their friends' hands, for all the implicit paternalistic reek there's not a note of honest care absent.

Bouchez and Regnier won a joint prize at Cannes for their roles, and their performances have that improvised-looking-but-probably-took-30-takes-each -time-to-get quality. They are particularly effective at moments both when their characters send out tentative care-feelers, latent with trust hopefully overriding suspicion and when they eventually turn on one another. Colin, as Marie's squeeze, Chris, plays a very believable asshole.

As Marie does what's known as "spiraling into" something or other, in her dead-end abusive relationship with EuroChris, we gradually reach an ending that many have found melodramatic, a rocky touch-down. Of course, as Hitchcock of all people has said, one person's melodrama is another's drama, and for many the ending will fit just right. Yet it is difficult to say which of the two main concluding directorial decisions enervate more or whether they do at all. One is honest and realist and therefore acceptable, consistent; the other more of a clumsy attempt at social comment an universalizing. But the artifice of almost any ending might have grated (shots of a bus ride away from Lille? Pious camera movements heavenwards?).

Although Dream Life inherits something from the best of French cinema verite, with its rickety yet immediate visuals, the cinematography doesn't suffer. Striking images include a pre-Marie Isa sleeping (and filmed) by grainy gaslight, an ethereal and misty beach scene showing the disjunction between Marie's romantic hopes and used reality, and a love scene that portrays Marie in fragile, baby-pink hues.

In depicting with clarity and honesty a friendship between two young women, Dream Life shifts nicely from a light, even funny naturalism, into a more poetic and ultimately more troubling tone, never glamorized and always compelling. It's definitely more than a dismissive wave at two filles paumees, and the precise details of life on les limites (e.g. cutting out magazine pictures to sell as postcards) fuel nobler purposes. I suppose the film could lose some minutes, but, come on, cut Zonca some slack.