‘Marie’: Ambitious, Stylized Tale of Star-Crossed Lovers

The bay around Nice in the south of France is called the Bay of Angels because it was once the habitat of a species of shark by that name. According to legend, the sharks, along with a pair of huge rocks that look like shark fins, guarded the bay from invaders. But once invasions waned, the sharks started feeding on the locals, requiring the rulers to make sacrifices of children to appease them and resulting in a new species, angel sharks.

Writer-director Manuel Pradal, in his dizzying, go-for-broke “Marie Baie des Anges,” suggests that nothing really has changed. For the most part, his film is a headlong visual rush in which beautiful 15-year-old Marie (Vahina Giocante, a dancer with the Marseilles Opera) parades around the port and its craggy, pine-crested hills like a biblical--or DeMille--temptress, inflaming both a contingent of rowdy, crude young American sailors and a pack of youths, dangerous feral creatures, hired to harvest local wheat fields.

The film has the feel of an opera in its stylized emotional extravagance and of a ballet in its restless, graceful movement, as the two groups of males encircle and retreat, tension mounting and easing. “Marie” is distinctly disturbing: How could such a locale of awesome, inviting natural beauty also be a place of such lawless, constant danger?

Breaking out of that teen pack is the solemnly handsome 17-year-old Orso (Frederic Malgras, a 15-year-old of Russian Gypsy descent), who is as drawn to Marie as she is to him. She is the angel, he is the shark, and they enact the mythical fusion said to produce those long-vanished angel sharks. Marie is, however, an angel only symbolically, for she is a totally contemporary teen who moves in complete freedom from whatever family she may have or wherever they may be. She knows her wanton flirting can be dangerous and is turned on by the risks.

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For his part, Orso is also not wholly a shark, deadly as he can be, but is yet another alienated kid looking for love. And sure enough, when Marie and Orso do manage to get away from corrupt, indifferent society to an abandoned island, they not only fall in love with each other but in their Eden regain some of the childlike delight in simple play that clearly had long since vanished from their lives.

Now all this is every bit as heady and exalted as it sounds. Yet because these teens have such beauty and vulnerability and because Pradal has such driving passion and visual panache--his cameraman Christopher Pollock is endlessly resourceful--this first-time writer-director gets away with a great deal of flashy technique and actually makes it serve in eliciting a genuine emotional response to his star-crossed lovers.

Unfortunately, Pradal also overreaches, punching up his narrative with a flood of strobe-like flashbacks that are too often more distracting, indeed confusing, than emotionally enriching. While this repeated indulgence makes “Marie Baie des Anges” too precious and arty for its own good, it does signal the arrival of a new, distinctive talent who leaves you curious to see what he’ll try next.

* MPAA rating: R, for violence, including some sexual assaults, sexuality, language and teen lawlessness. Times guidelines: The film’s strong R-rated elements make it inappropriate for impressionable youngsters.

‘Marie Baie des Anges’

(Marie Bay of Angels)

Vahina Giocante: Marie

Frederic Malgras: Orso

Jamie Harris: Jim

Nicolas Welbers: Goran

A Sony Pictures Classics release. Writer-director Manuel Pradal. Producer Philippe Rousselet. Executive producer Pascal Judelewicz. Cinematographer Christophe Pollock. Editor Valerie Deseine. Costumes Claire Gerard-Hirne. Music Carlo Crivelli. Production designer Javier Po. In French and English, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

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