Marie Baie des Anges

Marie Baie Des Anges, is quite simply, a highly under-rated French art picture. It is one of my favorite films, because of Maneul Pradal's unique way of storytelling, using visuals to convey the piece.

No, the plot doesn't really go anywhere. In the last 20 minutes or so, it doesn't even make any sense. But that's the whole point. It's symbolic. It isn't going anywhere because the lives of Marie and Orso aren't going anywhere. They are lost, troubled youth; who's only refuge is each other, and a deserted island off the coast of France.

After seeing this movie, I want to view other French movies. They have a unique style of production that is more visual art than plot. Mixing up the time lines detracted from the story. Some characters didn't fit into the story very well. Marie (Vahina Gioconte) oozed sensuality and moodiness. Without her, the story would have been meaningless. Do young people really live like this? Ignore my spelling errors please.

I must confess that I read several reviews of the film before actually seeing it, and despite a mixed greeting I tried to keep my mind open to it. It is a beautiful film.

The shots, unlike many of our formula movies, are not centered directly on what can be called a plot. But the quick snaps of seemingly unrelated material when taken as a whole becomes the entire atmosphere of the film and if those quick shots are so beautifully crafted as this then you have created a beautiful piece.

I digress, the film itself may be too deep for us Americans. most Americans when they sit down to watch a foreign film expect depth but in our V8 world we sometimes feel entitled to a clearly defined plot and story. "Whats all this about boats and a party!? What's this got to do with anything??" I can hear my contemporaries cry to which I can only answer emote don't analyze.

I won't compare the film to any others all films are works of art and deserve to be treated as such if you truly wish to recognize them. Marie Baie des Anges, with its haunting interconnectedness or perhaps disconnectedness weaves with beautiful images to create a truly beautiful film.

This movie kind of fits into this unofficial French genre which might be called the "French-jailbait-on-the-beach" film. This loose genre could include classy Eric Rohmer films like "Claire's Knee" and "Pauline at the Beach", the good but very depressing female coming-of-age films of Catherine Breillat like "36 Fillete" and "A moi souer", as well as enjoyable trash like "L'anne des medusas" (you could even throw "Swimming Pool" in here maybe). This movie is about a homeless teenage French girl who hangs around an American military base as kind of an amateur prostitute (it occurred to me watching this that one reason so many people hate America might be because our military uses the whole world as their whorehouse). She meets up with a psychotic French boy her own age and helps him steal a gun from the base, at which point the plot takes a rather implausible turn into serial murder.

This movie is not as sophisticated as a Rohmer film nor is it as squirm-inducingly realistic as a Breillat film. It kind of resembles "L'annee des medusas", but where that movie was exploitative trash from the get-go (featuring a somewhat older and very naked Valerie Kaprisky), this movie tries to be a realistic teenage slice-of-life for awhile but goes seriously off the rails with the serial murder plot. Like a lot of French movies it also suffers from a terminal case of pretentiousness. As with other films of its type, however, it does have some great cinematography of the beautiful Baie des Anges (where is that anyway?). These films would all make great advertisements for France's tourism board--if not for all the scary teenage French girls.

In the edenic French seaside seen in this film, I wonder if the American Naval men in this film are symbolic of the "conquering Americans" who run the danger of overwhelming the "innocent beauty" that are other nations. I might be reading too much into it, but when you think about it, they could have been any group of soldiers/sailors from any country. Imposing male lust knows no national boundaries.