WE ARE heading for a new genre: the utter nonsense film. And why not? When so much nonsense is peddled by the other arts, why should the movies abstain? Take a film such as Manuel Pradal’s Marie Baie des Anges, shown at numerous festivals, but surprisingly winning no awards despite all the prerequisites: pretension, disjointedness, vacuity, and illogic. The only reason I endured it to the end is a charming teenage actress named Vahina Giocante.
The hallmark of this and similar films is that the characters clearly have no real life outside of what is enacted for the camera. The performers merely go through the motions prescribed by the script (assuming there is one, and the whole thing isn’t improvised) and the director (of whom there always is one, rotten as he may be). We never know how Pradal’s characters got there—geographically, psychologically, or logically—whether they are teenage French girls, roving gypsy bands or loners, or American servicemen on and (in more ways than one) off base. Rootless, unattached, unemployed, and nonschool-going youngsters pop up here and there along the Riviera, headed for, indulging in, or narrowly avoiding orgies or near-orgies. And when battling angels and human sacrifice to mythic sharks are brought in, we go from the sublittoral to the ridiculous.
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