Marie Baie des Anges

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.