Marie Baie des Anges

For all the growing fascination with the sexuality of barely pubescent girls, the results on film have proven dreary, strident, and pretentious, like the recent repertoire of Christina Ricci and this debut feature from French director Manuel Pradal, a kind of Kids by way of Last Year at Marienbad. Even a fragmentary, non-chronological narrative and disjointed imagery can't obscure the story's basic lack of originality or point.

Set in present-day Nice, the film takes its title from its 15-year-old heroine Marie (a pouty, limber Vahina Giocante), who's nicknamed after the local Bay of the Angels by the Yank sailors she fancies -- drunken louts who seem refugees from a Jacques Demy movie gone horribly awry. Vying with them for her attentions is Orso (Frederic Malgras), the most sullen of the street punks who prowl the city on motorbikes. He seems more smitten by his handgun, however, and so the three escape for a brief Badlands-like idyll on a rocky island in the bay. Laboriously circling in on its focal moments of random violence and ennui, unconvincingly tied together by a legend about the "angels," killer sharks that once protected the bay from invaders but now must be placated by the sacrifice of children, Marie is an exercise in pointy-headed pedophilia.

-- Peter Keough