Viva Maria!

Now here's a weird one. It's a French film directed by the legendary Louis Malle, who was a contemporary of the French New Wave giants like Truffaut and Godard, though his movies aren't usually lumped in with theirs. The Cahiers du Cinema crowd made films for the masses, whereas Malle's family was aristocratic, having made a fortune during Napoleon's reign.

But anyway...Malle usually made very heavy, weighty films, often dealing with deviant sexuality (as in Amats, the 1958 film that made his international reputation, or Damage, his 1992 art house hit starring Jeremy Irons).

But Viva Maria is one of the goofier movies I've seen in some time. It an action-comedy-western telling the story of two vaudeville performers who find themselves leading a Southe American revolution. It's like a sexy French girl version of Woody Allen's Bananas. Or, if you prefer 80's PG comedy references, it's like Three Amigos with subtitles and tits.



The aforementioned tits reside on the chests of Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot, two of the loveliest of French actresses. Their chemistry and charm really makes this film work. When it works, that is. Viva Maria is a movie with a ton of enthusiasm and sparkle, a light comedy realized on a massive scale with charismatic leads, well-staged action sequences and a charming sense of fun.

Unfortunately, it's not actually very funny. Or funny at all.

Which is strange, because the story is kind of darkly amusing. It's a morbidly comic fable about Marie, the daughter of an Irish revolutionary (Bardot) on the run from the law in Central America. Her father taught her everything he knew, you see, so she's grown up as a terrorist-in-training who's also strangely ignorant about the world of everyday, law-abiding adults.

Bardot eventually finds her way into the caravan of Mary (Moreau), a formerly great actress now paying the bills by singing in a touring circus. The two Marys hit it off, and start their own double act following the suicide of Mary's former partner (one of several oddly morbid touches littered throughout the movie).

After they inadvertantly invent the striptease during a cabaret act gone horribly wrong, the Mary's become Central American celebrities, and the real adventure begins. During their travels, they'll encounter a cavalcade of bizarre characters, many of them semi-offensive Latin stereotypes and caricatures, including a bug-eyed, homicidal fat cat, a corrupt clergyman, a handsome revolutionary (played by George Hamilton!), and a cowardly generalisimo who, at one point, runs head-on into the most fake-looking prop cactus I have ever seen.

So you get the idea. It's a rollicking musical comedy with lots going on and an almost spastic level of energy. It essentially just fails to bring the funny. It's corny, confusing and occasionally silly, but just not funny.

Viva Maria is, however, extremely strange, which manages to keep the thing entertaining. (An adorable performance from Bardot, a woman with undeniable magnestism and charisma on screen, doesn't hurt either).

Take the love scene between Moreau and Hamilton. He's been chained up when Mary gets the circus' strongman to break her into his cell. With his hands tied to a pole above his head, Hamilton looks unmistakably like Jesus. And Moreau's crouching down before him, almost in supplication. And she is, after all, playing a woman named "Mary." So the symbolism is obvious.

But what's the point? Why go out of your way to set up a Passion-inspired lovemaking sequence in the middle of your campy adventure movie? When you see that scene, you don't laugh because it's so clever. You laugh that anyone would actually put something like that in a movie.

I don't mean to come down on Viva Maria. It's a zippy little film, a movie that it would be hard to hate. Moreau and Bardot are delightful in their roles, even though the musical numbers they're saddled with during the film's midsection leave something to be desired.

And, as I said, Malle's staging of the action sequences never fails to impress. He used a lot of vintage locomotives in the film to very nice effect. The entire revolution sequence looks great, and I was particularly surprised by the scale of the production. This cannot have been a cheap venture for a French movie in the mid-60's. Which makes a lot of its eccentricities all the more bizarre.