Yet a recognizable "foreignness" still pervades films like The Dreamlife of Angels (La Vie Revee des Anges), an approach to story and character that we can characterize instantly as originating outside our borders. The movie seems to have been made for a different audience; it does not bother to provide backstory or give any clues about what its characters are like before they reveal themselves in action. It seems foreign because it breaks the focus-group, test-audience rules that govern the films we see week in and week out, even the so-called "independents." That freedom, expressed here in a slice-of-life story about two young women thrown together through labor and love, is what draws American audiences tired of being analyzed before they reach the box office.

We are dropped into the film in medias res, as Isabelle (Elodie Bouchez) arrives in the French city of Lille to find that the friend she'd counted on staying with has disappeared. (It's only sometime later that we learn that the girl's name is Isabelle and that the city is Lille. Already we've crossed the border--an American film would have given us this information with a helicopter shot, a superimposed title, and, if necessary, a nametag.) Isa shows up for work at a clothing factory and cadges a place to stay from her fellow sewing-machine operator Marie (Natacha Regnier). In a matter of days the two have become friends, teasing strangers in malls and picking up odd jobs together. Their attempts to get into a club for free lead to dates with the club's bouncers, bikers named Charley and Fredo. When Marie starts sleeping with the club owner, a privileged jerk named Chris, Isa disapproves and their friendship grows strained.

At the same time, Isa develops a strange relationship with the owner of Marie's flat, a girl hospitalized in a coma after a car accident. She visits regularly and reads from the incapacitated girl's diary. Slowly Isa and Marie begin to show their true colors, switching places in the audience's mind. Isa, who appeared flighty and shallow in the opening scenes, reveals her ability to make instant but real connections with nearly anyone. But Marie, we discover, barely survives under a crushing lack of self-esteem. She holds herself aloof from what she imagines is beneath her, like begging or handing out fliers, while she squats in a borrowed flat and takes money from her boyfriend. Homeless Isa, it turns out, holds herself together, while Marie goes to pieces.

Nearly every character has unexpressed complexities, the kind that get you discussing who they really were after the lights come up. Is Charley, the leather-studded biker, a secret softie? Or do the crumpled bills he presses into Marie's hands signal his essentially mercenary nature? A more familiar approach to this story--an American approach--would have been to clarify each person's real character traits, if not at the outset, then at least eventually. Yet Erick Zonca, who directed and cowrote The Dreamlife of Angels, leaves to us truly important decisions about who these people are and what their actions mean. And his final shot, a dolly down a row of working women with a pause at each face, introduces a new theme about labor rather than wrapping up any of the themes we've already recognized.

Until the final scenes, it's not clear whether anything we would conventionally term "significant" is going to happen in The Dreamlife of Angels. And for someone who has fallen in love with the film's foreignness, it's possible to view that final significant occurrence as a betrayal--a concession to an audience that demands an ending. Yet it's consistent with the overall message of the film: the human need to instantly judge those we meet versus the impossibility of ever really knowing them.

When the film ended, I found myself saying, "That's the kind of film I like"--and then had to wonder what I meant by that. If it's elitist to enjoy foreign films because as a group they exhibit a refreshing liberty from our expectations, because they tend to have more courage in presenting flawed or unlikable characters and ambiguous situations, I suppose I'm guilty. But I don't just like foreign films, period; I like movies about real people, in all their exasperating, untidy difficulties. The true question isn't about elitism, but about whether the audience to whom American films regularly pander isn't like me--hungry for something more.