MARIE BAIE DES ANGES (ANGEL SHARKS)(director/writer: Manuel Pradal; cinematographer: Christophe Pollock; cast:Vahina Giocante (Marie), Frederic Malgras (Orso), Jamie Harris (Jimmy, Sailor), Nicolas Welbers (Goran), Swan Carpio (Jurec), Andrew Clover (Sailor), 1997)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Two things could be said for sure about this movie, which uses mostly nonprofessional actors, that it is disturbingly romantic and it is troublingly inconclusive. It tells a nonlinear, fantasy story, and it does so by stunning visualizations that capture the importunate moodiness about a boy and a girl, both of whom are outcasts, living in the beautiful French Riviera region of Côte d'Azur. It stylishly picks up the angst of the two passive teens, loners, who are prone to violence, boredom, sex, alienation, theft, and mental unbalance. There is no telling narrative to sink one's teeth into the story, but the visceral images and the emptiness of the youth's quest are fully explored in an original way, by the first-time director, Manuel Pradal.
Metaphors abound in this film, so much so that one could overdose on all the heavily intended poetical images and still not find much to sate one's hunger for what this film is ultimately about, which becomes the film's major fault. It starts off by making the beautiful landscape (ocean vistas and richly adorned hills) a metaphor and contrasting that with the ugly souls of all the young people in the film. The landmark rising out of the water from two million years ago in the Baie des Anges becomes the main metaphor for the film, as the bay near Nice has two spurs of jutting rocks called angel wings that are shaped like shark fins-- which have deterred invaders from coming ashore throughout the centuries, as their ships get shipwrecked when navigating on these waters. Also, once a year, the custom used to be that a child had to be sacrificed to appease the Gods. If you want something that is predictable about this unpredictable film, you have it here, you can bet your popcorn money that before the film is over some innocent kid will get it.
If you want to read some politics into this film, you might say that the director was using the local American navy base as a metaphor, showing the mixed-reaction it gets from the locals, as he tried to get at what the local reactions to the base are by showing that there is an undercurrent of disrespect and lack of trust for each other. The French locals are viewed as being thieves, dirty juvenile delinquent-types, and stupid by the Americans, while the locals view the sailors as violent, filthy rich, disrespectful of their girls, and unable to speak French fluently.
Marie (Vahina Giocante, who is a professional ballet dancer-in the Opera de Marseilles), is the troubled 15-year-old girl who is fascinated with picking up American sailors at the local navy base, despite some of the apprehensions she has about their sexual aggressiveness. Orso (Frederic Malgras) is a nonprofessional actor, who plays the troubled 17-year-old, the one seeking a gun, cast as a marginalized local. He falls for Marie and goes on a strange and empty romantic idyll with her.
The pair seem suitable for each other, as their desperate lives keep intersecting, and the two misfits continually pull each other out of predicaments. Nothing is told about their family history and where they come from. They have no conversations. It is as if they came out of nowhere and are only figments of our imagination. The mystery about them, gives them a Camus-like sense of existentialism, it is as if the more modern the story tries to be, the more it can be seen rooted in an old philosophy, a philosophy of fatalism.
The beauty in the film is from the never stopping camerawork, picking up one beautiful scene after another, though what connection this all has to do with the movie is anyone's guess. As I thought this film was about loners versus the group psychology prevailing, whereas the loners can't function with any kind of social measure because their troubling souls can find no place in modern French society to fit in. The trouble with that pat explanation of the film, is that the film doesn't help itself any by overloading the imagery, so that if one wanted to, there could by many other explanations for what the film was about. After a certain point, that becomes an annoying feature of the film, as the two teens lose their humanity and seem to be only symbols for what the director was trying to say. This is possible because of there persistent silence and lack of character development.
Marie is seen erotically dancing in front of the sailors and then again in front of a boat owner and his son, where she distracts them so that Orso could steal their boat and the two of them use the boat to go on an exotic picnic together. Orso lives by robbing houses and is a peripheral hanger-on with the locals. She has been rejected by the locals for choosing to go after the sailors, who lure her with their money and forbidden sex, taking her to nightclubs, but the sailors reject her after having sex with her, and brutally throw her away from them when they had what they wanted from her, calling her a whore.
The point of the story is, that these two losers have found each other and want to share their disturbed lives together without judgment and modification. Aside from being a stunning film to watch, I could see no beauty in its dark character portrayal of the lovers and the film's overall pessimistic attitudes toward youth. The film had too many missing ingredients in it for it to be impactful; I could hardly remember the main characters just a week later after seeing the film, only remembering how alluring Vahina Giocante was and how beautiful the South of France looks.
REVIEWED ON 1/15/2000 GRADE: C+
Dennis Schwartz: " Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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