Sinopsis:
Orso est un jeune pickpoket qui agit dans le train de nuit qui file vers l'Italie. Il demande a Goran, un compagnon d'infortune, de lui fournir une arme. Mais Goran flambe l'argent d'Orso et disparait. Trahi, ce dernier retourne a ses larcins. Marie a quatorze ans. Petite reine de la baie de Nice, elle virevolte de loulous en GI qui sont la le temps d'une escale. Orso et Marie, solitaires et orgueilleux, vont se croiser, s'ignorer, se defier, puis s'aimer.
Some films use a strong narrative to explore themes. Others utilize detailed character development for the same purpose. More rare are movies like Marie Baie des Anges, which attempts to use images and atmosphere to convey emotions and advance the plot. This is the kind of motion picture that will frustrate anyone who looks for a solid storyline, but may fascinate viewers who aren't bothered by this reliance upon the compelling power of well-photographed visuals. In other words, only art house audiences need bother. Marie Baie des Anges is slow moving but hypnotic, and always pretty to look at even when the story strays into the realm of the improbable and the incomprehensible.
The film stars the alluring and sensual Vahina Giocante as Marie, a 15 year-old girl who spends her summer wandering the beaches in the South of France. Using her undeniable charms to enflame the libidos of several American soldiers (all portrayed as unflattering caricatures), she enjoys their attention as they take her to nightclubs and ply her with champagne. When she is around them, she feels like a queen. But Marie is a tease, and the GIs soon tire of her.
In parallel with Marie's story, the film introduces us to 17 year-old Orso (Frederic Malgras), an outsider who is also spending his summer on the French Riviera. Like Marie, Orso does not feel bound by the conventions of society, but his rebellion manifests itself in violence and lawlessness. Orso is easily one of the most dangerous and uninhibited boys roaming the beaches. Ultimately, he and Marie meet, and, although their initial encounter is unfriendly, they soon find themselves attracted to each other, and embark on a journey to an island paradise. However, reality intrudes.
Manuel Pradal, making his directorial debut, treats the film as if it is a canvas, juxtaposing images of incredible sensuality, amazing beauty, and graphic violence. In this movie, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. The film shows how somewhere as beautiful as the Riviera (and the "Baie des Anges" in particular) can conceal great pain and misfortune. Every shot is carefully selected to emphasize the director's vision of how this Eden is a place of contradictions. By carefully choosing the times of day when the lighting is just right, Pradal and cinematographer Christophe Pollock have sought to recreate the Riviera captured in the paintings of Matisse.
For Marie Baie des Anges, Pradal has assembled a cast of newcomers and screen neophytes, many of whom came from poor backgrounds. The two leads, Vahina Giocante and Frederic Malgras, have charisma, although Malgras occasionally shows his lack of acting experience. Before landing this role, he lived in a caravan of Russian gypsies north of Paris. Giocante, a dancer for the Marseilles Opera, was only 13 when Pradal chose her to play Marie, and she is a true natural. Already, she has been called "the new Bardot" by virtually everyone. In the wake of her stunning debut here, there is little doubt that she will be heard from again.
Pradal's attention to visual detail has its pros and cons. On the positive side, it effectively captures the chaos of youth, when girls and boys struggle with intimacy, clumsily learn about the power of sexuality, and feel the sting of rejection. It's not so much love that eventually binds Marie and Orso together, as their unspoken recognition of how much they have in common. Too often, however, Pradal becomes so enraptured with his visual poetry that he lets the thin narrative fragment to the point where it makes no sense. For those willing to endure the frustration engendered by such lapses, Marie Baie des Anges offers a few unconventional pleasures. James Berardinelli
Wild, Brutal Adolescents As Angels Among Sharks
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 19, 1998. new York Times
French legend has it that the two spurs of rock jutting ominously from the sea in the ''bay of angels,'' near Nice, are shaped like the fins of ''angel sharks'' that once upon a time devoured the bodies of invaders shipwrecked while navigating the area's treacherous waters. In Manuel Pradal's visually gorgeous film, ''Marie Baie des Anges,'' those rocks and the pearly waters surrounding them become a potent metaphor for the savagery of teen-age sexual rites.
In this dizzying paganistic ode to Eros, where the camera almost never stops moving, the angel sharks have been replaced by the bodies of restless, hot-blooded adolescents diving and treading water and nipping on each other in the shadowy depths. The comparison is made explicit in a scene in which a pubescent swimmer with an angelic halo of blond hair is shot and the water slowly turns deep red.
At the center of the film -- whose cast largely consists of nonactors gleaned from French stadiums, beaches, Gypsy camps and housing projects -- is a brooding, sensual 15-year-old girl named Marie (Vahina Giocante) who runs wild one summer. Marie snubs the impoverished local boys in favor of a group of arrogant American sailors who take her to nightclubs and hotels. Then having had their way with her, they discard her with brutal contempt, calling her a Gypsy whore. Marie ends up sharing a brief idyll with Orso (Frederic Malgras), a rootless, pug-faced petty criminal who robs houses and hangs around with the local youth gangs.
''Marie Baie des Anges,'' which opens today at Film Forum, is filled with ominous images of men in packs. Whether on the prowl for girls or for a fight, the energy of their giddy, reckless camaraderie is charged with physical danger. In one scene, Marie does a wild Gypsy dance for the sailors who encircle her with a whooping euphoria that you feel could at any second turn ugly. In another scene, a group of sailors in a car are chased by the local boys on motorbikes after exchanging insults. These scenes give you the feeling that gang rape and gang war are almost the same thing and that given the right circumstances they are inevitable eruptions of male aggression.
For a movie that celebrates the raw sexual energy of adolescence, ''Marie Baie des Anges'' is surprisingly unexplicit. The sexual encounters, instead of being set up the way they are in most films, are brief gawky episodes in a continual game of roughhouse. If they're intense, they're also no big deal. They're simply part of the natural ebb and flow of the characters' animal exuberance. These youths have no apparent physical self-consciousness. You sense that none have ever seen a Stairmaster or lifted a barbell.
After a while, the images of water, rocks and half-naked bodies merge into a vision of the film's characters as untamed forces of nature who are the fauna of the environment in which they cavort. Viewed this way, you begin to stop thinking of them as civilized humans bound to any social or moral order, even when they commit crimes.
This dizzy lyricism comes at a price. The movie has no sense of time, and its story line isn't always clear. The life it evokes is one big swirl of ceaseless physical activity and raw sensation. It is about as far away as you can get from the icky, coy Hollywood ''primitivism'' of ''The Blue Lagoon.''
Marie.Baie.des.Anges.1997.Vahina Giocante DVDRip.XviD-rucunus.avi 
