I went in hoping that all the good things I had heard about this movie were justified. Unfortunately, they weren't. Though "Dream Life of Angels" has an interesting premise and starts out promisingly enough, bad pacing and a meandering plot ultimately sinks it as a film.
The problem is not that nothing happens in it. Not all that much happens in "Bicycle Thief" either, but the latter film is a masterpiece because the individual scenes in it add up to something much greater than themselves. The scenes of "Dream Life", however, have no such coherence. Lasting only a few minutes each, their arrangement seems arbitrary, as little plot or character development occur in any of them. This soon begins to wear on the viewer, and halfway into the film I was already beginning to feel the back of my seat.
Not helping matters either is the unimaginative way with which the story (what little of it there is) is told. Marie's seduction and abandonment by Chris, a callous, young club-owner, is shown without much originality, spark or pathos. Perhaps if music had been used some of these weaknesses could have been hidden. But none comes till the end, at which point it seems incongruous. One may admire "Dream Life's" attempt to make art from the bleak lives of two young women, but that does not make it a great, or really even a good, film.
The problem is not that nothing happens in it. Not all that much happens in "Bicycle Thief" either, but the latter film is a masterpiece because the individual scenes in it add up to something much greater than themselves. The scenes of "Dream Life", however, have no such coherence. Lasting only a few minutes each, their arrangement seems arbitrary, as little plot or character development occur in any of them. This soon begins to wear on the viewer, and halfway into the film I was already beginning to feel the back of my seat.
Not helping matters either is the unimaginative way with which the story (what little of it there is) is told. Marie's seduction and abandonment by Chris, a callous, young club-owner, is shown without much originality, spark or pathos. Perhaps if music had been used some of these weaknesses could have been hidden. But none comes till the end, at which point it seems incongruous. One may admire "Dream Life's" attempt to make art from the bleak lives of two young women, but that does not make it a great, or really even a good, film.