Marie from the Bay of Angels (1997)

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

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 terms of my personal bad movie test - I ended up pressing the fast forward button about 23 minutes into it and had to resist pressing the button throughout the film. Everyone looks stupid here. And the men all look ugly too.I compare this film to Mee Pok Man (from Singapore) because this is part of what I call the genre of "young attractive woman in an artsy film that one would like to think that it's going to go somewhere, but one just ends up feeling angry, annoyed, and betrayed at the characters." Not worth the time despite the good looking young women. Skip this one.

This film appropriated quite a bit from Catherine Breillat's 36 Filette, made nine years earlier: both are French, set in that country's oceanfront resorts, and star alienated 14-year old sexual temptresses who consort with older men.The difference is that Breillat is a film maker of insight, imagination, and courage who knows how to depict character. Whoever made this messy derivative (his name doesn't matter) has none of those abilities. This bumbling, superficial film is poorly conceived and constructed, and is even astonishingly prudish about showing the body of its leading lady, given that the film centers on her sexual attractiveness. Forget about this confused pallid imitative loser, and instead rent the real thing, the more intense and better characterized 36 Filette.

This is truly a film about what it is like to be a teenager. Nothing is trivialized and none of the characters are "heroes." The protagonist is only that because she is the most interesting and accurate depiction of how a teenager sees life. These children have grown up quickly and at the age of fourteen, they view life with the skepticism of adults but lack the wisdom and the compassion that age garners. To say they are shallow and self-absorbed is a cop-out. Of course they are. That's the point. They see that they have matured physically but fail to realize they are still essentially children psychologically. They are eager to test out their newfound independence and their roles as young adults, particularly with sex. Marie realizes that she can use her body to get what she wants from some of the naval men in the area, but she is still too young to understand the price she is paying for their gifts. Orso has been picking pockets and burglarizing homes for some time and decides to up the ante with by packing a pistol. Their love is not the mature and caring relationship. They are in love the way every teenager is, that is to say that they think they are and with their hormones pounding, who's to say they're wrong. Similar to Kids or Gummo, the film to which it has been likened, Marie Baie des Anges shows the teenage years as a critical period in life. A teenager is still afflicted with the rashness of youth, but their actions suddenly have life-altering consequences.