The summer doldrums are upon me - the summer stupor. I pick up the paper, look at the movies playing, put the paper down. Can it be? I have become jaded from seeing TOO MANY MOVIES.

Scan the movie ads and you will know the symptoms of film reviewer's disease:

"Start the Oscar drum rolls now."

"An exquisitely crafted, one-of-a-kind movie." "As enchanting as movies get!"

" Extraordinarily powerful and mysterious!" "Ravishingly beautiful!"

These rapturous encomiums (encomia?), by various obscure fish-wrap toilers and scribes, describe the following movies (and if you can match the quotes to the films, you care a great deal more than I): Instinct, Notting Hill, The Red Violin, Besieged and Tea with Mussolini. (The latter wins my worst title of the year award. I await the sequel, Coffee with Hitler.) Despite these recommendations I haven't the slightest desire to see any of them. I don't really blame these reviewers too much, even though I laugh at them. If your job requires you to watch a few hundred films a year, after a while your sentences will all end in exclamation points.

Of course most of the films in a given year aren't masterpieces, or even very good in any lasting sense. Why should they be? Are great, memorable books published every year? Several quite good ones, I would say - one great one if we're lucky. But movies being such a popular art, the thirst for novelty seems to never be slaked, and we expect, nay demand, ravish- ingly beautiful, extraordinarily powerful and mysterious works every week.

Well, it's nonsense. And so it's a blessing, really, that the summer rolls around and nothing is playing that one just has to see. It gives a movie reviewer some much needed perspective....

I would like, then, to avoid overpraising THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS, the debut film by Erick Zonca that did so well at Cannes last year. It is a quietly observant little movie which doesn't quite produce an epiphany but which has much to recommend it. Isa (Elodie Bouchez) is a wanderer who shows up in the small French city of Lille with little means of support but a belief in the goodness of others. She ends up as roommate to a passionately troubled and willful young woman named Marie (Natacha Regnier) who is house-sitting for a mother and daughter who have been in a serious auto accident. The film carefully and gradually develops their relationship - Zonca is very good at the little details of a budding friendship, and it is refreshing to see a film on this theme told from the point of view of women.

Isa seems to be seeking connection in some way - with other women and also the mute, hidden part of herself. She finds the diary of the young girl who is now comatose in the accident, reads it, and then begins to visit the girl in the hospital. But intimacy with her roommate is threatened when the headstrong Marie becomes obsessed with an abusive relationship - her desperate attachment to this man like a wedge driven between them. Regnier's performance is remarkably vulnerable - her descent is heart-rending and rather scary. Bouchez's natural, inward quality is quite good as well. The themes - the stifling of women's sense of themselves in the addiction of romance over and against the potential healing power of friendship - are not completely realized, I think, but I like that they were stated at all. This is a film of unaffected grace that portrays real, complex people trying to discover who they are in relation to one another - a good movie that only seems extraordinary because honesty in film has become so rare.

Outside the theater after the movie, an acquaintance (a writer) said, "Maybe I've been watching too many American action movies, but that just seemed too...slow."

"I think you've been watching too many American action movies," I said. I think she was taken aback. I wasn't trying to be sarcastic at all - I was just following her lead, really. The movie didn't seem slow to me - the pace was just right for a film that wants to develop character. I tried to imagine my acquaintance watching Mother and Son, for instance, or Antonioni. There's slow and then there's slow. But I confess that I'm alarmed by this speeding up of many people's expectations from film narrative. Maybe it has something to do with the "plot-driven" nature of popular entertainment. We become conditioned to watch film as a series of exciting events, bang bang - everything in the rhythm of action, whereas it takes time to really develop a character to the point where he or she is more than just a plot peg. Most films don't bother to take the time, so maybe the ones that do seem "slow" to us? I'm not sure. I'm also not sure that this speed, that seems to be a feature of a general desire for distraction and excitation, is good for us. It doesn't seem to be good for art.

What surprised me again and again in my conversations with people is how often they assume that a film's purpose is to make us feel a certain way. "Depressing" is a standard negative comment about films without happy endings, as if the meaning of a work is somehow contained in a particular emotional reaction to it. I work in a library, and very often someone will ask me to recommend a book that is "uplifting." I have difficulty understanding this. Whatever ideas a book may have about life and human beings, whatever light it shines on our condition, in whatever mode (tragic, comic, sublime, grotesque, etc.) are nullified in the mere desire to have a feeling produced, as it were passively, in the gut. What is missing is any sense of participation. If I get involved emotionally in a movie, I would hope it's because I engage with it, grapple with its problems, project myself into the characters so as to see life from their point of view, perhaps glimpse some kind of truth in the midst of the story. I'm not speaking of pure escapist entertainment, which has its place. But when someone says, "Oh, that was depressing," what does it really say about the movie? It doesn't tell me if the film was successful or not, really. It says nothing about the quality of the film - it could be a bad film, but not because it made so-and-so depressed, only because it failed in its fundamental purpose, in its author's aim, or because the aim was vague or unworthy to begin with. But all this statement really says is that the person saying it is depressing himself. Because his encounter with a film, or a book, or a piece of music, or whatever, is measured merely with the dull instrument of his mood. Give him some blank hero who triumphs over an enemy, or succeeds in love with a blank heroine, and he is satisfied. Nothing is disturbed, no one is depressed. And nothing is gained.

But there I go. I'm getting passionate about film again, and it's summer, a time to be drowsy instead. Good night.

Chris Dashiell

CineScene/Cinema-l, 1999