This astonishingly confident first feature from writer-director Pradal was easily my favorite new film at this year's Seattle International Film Festival. Pradal revitalizes the tale of young, futureless lovers doomed to a life of exploitation and violence by placing it within the context of American cultural imperialism, and by vigorously affirming and extending the past glory of French cinema, in particular the French New Wave.

Frederic Malgras and Vahina Giocante in Marie Baie Des Anges

Every frame of this tragic story of soulless youth amidst the illusory enchantment of the French Riviera bristles with vitality. Pradal and his gifted cinematographer Christophe Pollack have an impeccable sense of camera placement and pictorial composition, an exhilarating sense of how and when to jump fluidly from intimate detail to epic perspective. Effectively aided by the music of Carlo Crivelli (an enchanted mix of eerie doom invaded periodically by the lilt of American musicals), the film has the hyper-real shimmer and shroud of a perilous fable. It's a unified vision of the illusion of paradise, behind which lies a darkening crisis of societal identity.

Pradal exposes us as tourists (invaders of a sort) in the opening frames. We are floating in the Bay of Angels near Nice, so named because it is home to the angel shark. A guide's voice tells us that according to legend the islands near the shore (which are shaped like shark fins) repelled invasions, but as invasions grew rarer, the sharks would turn on the bay to exact flesh and blood. Immediately, we are introduced to a gypsy boy named Orso (15 year-old newcomer Frederic Malgras), a rootless petty thief, who shoots an even younger angel-faced boy in the water at point blank range. Surprisingly, we are witnessing the end of our story, and with flashbacks and flashforwards, Pradal will take us on the cracked and chaotic path leading up to this act of remorseless violence.

Throughout, Pradal updates Godard's concern with the hate-fascination of Franco-American cultural relations, while his non-sequential juxtapositions constitute a rebuke to the connect-the-dots narrative mentality of American filmmakers, and haunt one another in a way no linear approach could achieve. After all, the present for these young lives is a chaotic tapestry, invaded by a future that may as well be the past.

Malgras is a real find. Though colder, he exhibits some of the battered charisma of a young Jean-Paul Belmondo. Aspiring to the archetype of an independent tough-guy makes him stand out from the gangs of lost and lawless youths with which he runs. The beautiful gypsy Marie (Vahina Giocante, another extraordinary newcomer) with whom Orso is infatuated, is a vacuously insolent Lolita who exploits herself as a figure of desire around which the boys hungrily circle.

Marie spends most of her time, however, at a nearby American military base, a fictional enclave that is Pradal's signifier of cultural invasion and the lure of violence. Marie is drawn to the arrogance of these men who are used to taking what they want without asking. Pradal presents them like boisterously invading extras from a 40s or 50s-era Hollywood war movie. Like sharks, they beckon her to the bay, and as they circle her, the camera, too, worshipfully surrounds her, incapable of concealing its desire. At times Marie lounges in their great white shark of a car, an Oldsmobile convertible with blood-red interior and a radio that seems to play only American music. And sometimes she fingers the gun in its glove box.

If nothing else, Marie is the tale of an American gun - the lure of it, the aura of potency that surrounds it, and the inevitability of its almost casual use in unexpected places. Though Orso and Marie steal away to an idyllic island, and for a time even approximate playful lovers, the power of a gun pulls them back. Consider that Orso asks young Goran, the angel-faced boy, to get him "the best looking gun" he can find. And later, when Marie steals an American's gun and gives it to Orso, he says, almost in amazement, "Look, it fits my hand"; as if it is an extension of him, as if he has become complete, as if to say, yes, of course, it was made to be used. After all, it was his fate, sealed and revealed to us in the beginning, a fate that no mere image of paradise could alter.

'The Big One' Made 'Titanic' Look Small

During my absence from the paper's last issue, I took particular note of a little film with a big heart that bravely set sail in waters choked with brain-numbing chunks of entertainment. These dangerously aimless icebergs, with names like Lost in Space, Deep Impact, and, of course, Titanic, left little room for a film like The Big One to maneuver, let alone stay afloat. Director Michael Moore's captivating socio-political essay opened in the USA on 33 screens April 12 and grossed a paltry $146,909 its opening weekend. Compare that with the $28 and a half million Titanic devoured on 2,674 screens during its opening weekend in the USA alone.

One reason Titanic was a hit to the tune of more than half a billion dollars (aside from the fact that spending large amounts of money has a way of attracting large amounts of money) is that it provides a class struggle melodrama that is as easy to digest as it is to dispel. In it we see cartoonishly evil rich people and their dangerously flawed technologies oppress the saintly poor, all of whom can be hissed and cheered at as easily as they can be forgotten. Neither those from the Right nor the Left are asked to seek meaningful identification. Titanic's director James Cameron intends a grand metaphor for the wayward twentieth century, but the fact is that all audiences, regardless of their politics, get a superficial charge out of watching that wonder of the world sink out of sight. It's a masturbatory exercise, hence the reports of people who flocked to see it again and again. A disposable tale, Titanic is as durable as wet cardboard.

Okay. They say when you buy a boat it becomes a kind of money pit. But instead of throwing good money after bad, why didn't you, the movie going public, put your money where your mouth was? You voted with your dollars for a rousing, poignant film about a homespun traveler whose sharp tongue exposes the wealthy and powerful for the self-serving scoundrels that they are. Well, why didn't you lay down your hard-earned cash for a film that did the same thing without the lip service - a film that actually fought the corporate greed running rampant throughout the country? Miramax, The Big One's distributor, promised to donate 50% of the film's profits to Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan which was devastated by General Motors' factory closures and where 68% of children still live below the poverty level.

Sure, the doughy-faced, scruffy-looking Moore hasn't the dashing sex appeal of Titanic's Leonardo De Caprio, but one could not find a more appealing voice or a more animated advocate for the disenfranchised than the valiantly quixotic Moore. As he crossed the country on a tour for his book Downsize This! Moore eschewed promotion for stand-up comedy and compassionate counseling for the under-paid and the unemployed that gathered to see him. Between speaking engagements, he and a skeletal video crew penetrated a number of corporations to present "Downsizer of the Year" certificates and ask why companies continue to downsize while posting record profits.

Wherever they went they were predictably stonewalled by closemouthed, paranoid representatives who parroted the company line about maintaining competitiveness and protecting shareholders. But Moore's revealing portrait is of American people - not shareholders - whose real wages have failed to increase while corporate CEO salaries have skyrocketed and profits have risen 250 percent since 1991. It's a portrait of jobs vanishing only to reappear in foreign countries, of poverty extending to 20 percent of American children, of emerging companies such as Manpower, Inc., a temporary agency that is now the United States' largest, and of a shoe company that pays a basketball star $20 million a year while the shoes he endorses are made by Indonesian children for 40 cents an hour.

The Big One climaxed in a painfully hilarious visit with Nike CEO Phil Knight. Knight chuckled at Moore's tenacious attempts to get him on a plane to the Asian shoe factories the CEO has never seen, and rebuffed his pleadings to build a shoe factory in Flint saying, "No Americans want to make shoes," even though Moore brought video proof of hundreds of Flint residents willing to work. When all else failed (including Moore challenging Knight to a foot race and an arm wrestling match), he even begged Knight for a donation of $10,000 for the schools of Flint.

Throughout, Moore was as relentless and razor sharp as an iceberg slashing at an ocean liner. With ample cheek and biting humor, he put democracy in action and by example challenged us to do the same. As he says, "A democracy is, after all, only as good as its participants. If it becomes a spectator sport, it's over." The wonder of The Big One was that by seeing it we could have been both spectators and participants. It's too bad it made such a small splash. Since December 21 of last year, Titanic has become the eighth largest grossing film in American movie history while The Big One sank out of sight in about a month.

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Contents this page were published in the July/August, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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