A heartstopper if ever there was one, French starlet Elodie Bouchez acts out of her skin in Erick Zonca's The Dream Life of Angels -- but she nearly denied herself the chance. "When I got the first draft of the script, I didn't really like my character," she says. Since writer-director Zonca had written the film specifically for Bouchez and labored over it for two years, her response was particularly distressing. It took a huge leap of faith, in both Zonca and her own abilities, for Bouchez to commit to the project. She admits she was initially at a loss as to how to interpret the sparsely written role: "I didn't know what to do . . . but then on the first day of shooting, I discovered the character and fell in love with her."

By then, to Zonca's horror, she had hacked off her long black hair -- just before filming commenced, in fact. "Erick was like, 'Wow! What the fuck has she done?'" Bouchez recalls. "But it was too late."

Still, her instincts worked for her. The film is an emotionally powerful study of the deterioration of a friendship between two young women. Last May, it brought Best Actress awards at Cannes for both Bouchez and her screenmate, Natacha Régnier. While Régnier, as the turbulent Marie, is excellent, it is the natural, unaffected Bouchez who -- seemingly unaware of the camera -- dominates the picture as the magnetic gamine Isa. Cocooned in sweaters against the unforgiving Lille winter, her fingertips frayed-looking thanks to chipped nail polish, Isa is the kind of female drifter French cinema alone seems to understand. And Bouchez herself, who also stars in the Sundance entry Louise (Take 2), is the kind of actress who could inspire a new wave.