Anyone who has visited the French Riviera knows that it has more in common with Miami than with Eden. It is a crowded, expensive perch for ugly condos and desperate beachgoers, and the only place where teenage lovers can safely gambol is in their bathtubs. Marie Baie des Anges is as realistic as Blue Lagoon, although without any copulating turtles.
The movie stars Vahina Giocante as Marie, a fifteen-year-old who spends her vacations on the Riviera, picking up American sailors and sleeping under the stars. No mention of her parents, home, income, past, experience, etc. She is the pornographer’s dream, an uncomplicated nubile teenager who exists only as she is. Giocante has been billed as “the new Bardot,” and she’s off to a good start: Bardot didn’t make many good films, either.
On the beach, she meets Orso (Frederic Malgras), a sullen lout who lurks about looking like a charade with the answer, “Leonardo DiCaprio.” Together, they run, play, boat, swim, eat strawberries, and flirt with danger, and inevitably a handgun surfaces, so we will not be in suspense about the method used to bring the film to its unsatisfactory conclusion. “Get me the best-looking gun you can find,” Orso tells Marie, who steals it from a one-night stand.
The movie is yet one more evocation of doomed youth, destined for a brief flash of happiness and a taste of eroticism before they collide with the preordained ending. All of these movies end the same way, with one form of death or another, which casts a cold light on the events that went before, showing you how unlucky these young people were to be in a story written by a director who lacked the wit to think of anything else that might happen.
The filmmaker is Manuel Pradal, who in addition to recycling exhausted clichés also fancies himself at the cutting edge of narrative. He tells his story out of sequence, leaving us to collect explanations and context along the way; one advantage of this style is that only at the end is it revealed that the story was not about anything. We get glimpses and fragments of actions; flashforwards and flashbacks; exhausting self-conscious artiness.
Yes, there is beautiful scenery. And nice compositions. Lots of pretty pictures. Giocante and Malgras are superficially attractive, although because their characters are empty vessels there’s no reason to like them much, or care about them. The movie is cast as a tragedy, and it’s tragic, all right: Tragic that these kids never developed intelligence and personalities.
The Master Gunfighter
(Directed by “Frank Laughlin,” aka Tom Laughlin; starring Tom Laughlin; 1975)
A film archaeologist could have fun with The Master Gunfighter, sifting among its fragments of plot and trying to figure out what the hell happened to this movie on the way to the theater. The movie opens with a long-winded narration, in a hapless attempt to orient us, but not long afterward the narrator has to break in again—we’re lost already. It’s all to little avail. I don’t think there’s any way an intelligent moviegoer could sit through this mess and accurately describe the plot afterward.
On the basis of the available evidence, I’d say the director and star, Tom Laughlin, began with a badly confused screenplay (one that never did clearly establish the characters and the main story line) and then shot so much film that he had to cut out key scenes in order to edit everything down to a reasonable playing time.
The movie opens, for example, with Laughlin leaving the California hacienda of his wife, for obscure reasons (and not only the reasons are obscure—I had to read the synopsis to figure out the woman was his wife). Then there’s a title card—“Three Years Later”—and he decides to go back to the hacienda, for more compelling reasons. This is pretty dizzying exposition.
The movie has ambitions to look like one of Sergio Leone’s Italian Westerns—it has the eerie music and the vast landscapes and the irritating habit of opening and closing scenes with zooms as dramatic as they’re arbitrary. Watching it, we reflect that Leone was never too strong on plotting either (what actually happened in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains a matter of great controversy). But Leone at least was the master of great moments—stretches of film that worked, even if they meant nothing.
Laughlin has moments, too, but he has no flair for timing or development or surprise. We leave The Master Gunfighter remembering very long, very pointless conversations in which the characters seemed to be referring to events in another film. These yawn-inducing dialogues are occasionally interrupted by swordplay, so badly staged and photographed we’re not even sure Laughlin could handle a steak knife. In one of his predicaments, he is surrounded by enemy swordsmen—so he backs up against an old shed. But wait a minute, you’re thinking: If he’s surrounded, how does he back up against that shed? What about the guys behind him? Aha!
The opening narration provides some nonsense about samurai training that’s supposed to explain the sword, as well as the MG’s revolver, which can fire twelve shots. After we’ve seen the MG nail all kinds of bad guys with the pistol, only to use the sword in his next emergency, we’re reminded of John Carter of Mars, the Edgar Rice Burroughs hero who kept getting sliced up in swordplay when he could have just pulled out his atomic ray gun. But nothing as simple as logic is going to explain this movie.
Maxie
(Directed by Paul Aaron; starring Glenn Close, Mandy Patinkin, Ruth Gordon; 1985)
Jan is an absolutely normal San Francisco woman. She lives in a big landmark Victorian house, she’s married to a librarian, and she works as the secretary to the local Catholic bishop. (So far, all that’s wrong with this picture is the landmark Victorian house, which Jan and her husband, Nick, could not afford unless he owned the library and she were the bishop.)
One day they are stripping wallpaper from the walls, and they discover a message that was left more than sixty years ago by Maxie, a flapper who once lived in the house. We know the message is from Maxie because Ruth Gordon, the next-door neighbor, drops in and tells them Maxie once had a bit role in a silent film and then died tragically at a young age.
Jan and Nick do what any normal couple would do. They rent a videocassette of the old silent film. And apparently their act of seeing Maxie’s old performance, in Maxie’s old house, causes the psychic energies to flow in such a way that Maxie appears and possesses Jan’s body. Jan begins to talk in Maxie’s penetrating nasal screech and she starts using a lot of 1920s slang. But she still looks exactly like Glenn Close, who plays both Jan and Maxie.
Nick (played by Mandy Patinkin) does not at first figure out what is happening. This leads to some embarrassment, as when Maxie suddenly occupies Jan’s body during an office party and throws her drink down the dress of Nick’s boss (Valerie Curtin, as a sex-mad harridan). There are other horrible moments, as when Jan becomes Maxie at bedtime, and when Maxie forces Jan to audition for a TV commercial. Maxie can be shocking, but she is not anywhere near as shocking as the utter, complete lack of wit and intelligence in this movie, which goes its entire length without producing one single clever twist on its boring premise.
As a service to the screenwriter and director, I herewith supply some ideas they might have used:
(1) Jan becoming Maxie during sex, to Nick’s consternation;
(2) The bishop turning out to be Maxie’s old beau, before he went into the seminary;