Dream Life: Isabelle and Virginie Go Daydreaming, by David Bax

So it’s not just a clever name. Even if the word weren’t right there in the title, it would be impossible not to describe Mireilles Dansereau’s Dream Life (aka La vie rêvée) as “dreamlike,” starting immediately from the hypnotic, slow motion opening sequence. This newly restored 1972 Québécois film, opening at Metrograph in New York City on November 4th, is not merely an exercise in surrealness, though (not that that would be such a bad thing). It’s also a touchingly unjudgmental portrait of female friendship.

In many ways, Dream Life seems very specifically of its time, from the loud-patterned fabrics to the grain of the 16mm images to the bluesy, post-hippy guitar doodling on the soundtrack. But, again, just like a dream, it also seems to exist completely outside of time.

Dream Life’s story kicks off when Isabelle (Liliane Lemaître-Auger) gets a job at a company that produces television advertisements and immediately strikes a bond with another employee on the payroll, an animator named Virginie (Véronique Le Flaguais). Dansereau strikes a perhaps playful and tongue in cheek but ultimately passionate division between the (literal) commercial filmmaking in which Isabelle and Virginie are engaged in order to keep their bills paid and her own, less rigid and more instinctive artistic impulses. The clear implication here is that these two young women would prefer to be making films like the one we’re watching. Still, Dansereau can’t help but make the few ads we do get to see funny and inventive.

But it’s in the women’s shared private lives together that we get to see Dansereau become unbridled. Dream Life suddenly goes handheld and lens flare happy and even weaves in elements of collage and animation. Taken as a whole, the film feels lovingly crafted, artisanal and unbeholden to the expectations of the art form or the industry around it.

With the surreal anti-logic on display, the quick and deep relationship formed between the two young woman and, of course, the fact that it’s all happening in French, it’s kind of impossible not to think of Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating when watching Dream Life. But that playful dive into female bonding was still two years away when Dansereau released Dream Life into the world. It’s more than conceivable that Rivette found his own inspiration here, in a film that we’re lucky to still have with us and so lovingly restored.

Dream Life was restored from the original Super 16mm reversal film by Elephant – mémoire du cinema Québécois. It is being released by Arbelos.