"Visages du littoral ; la Manche " is one of that (too numerous) kind of documentaries one watches without displeasure but that hardly leaves any trace in our memories.
To make us travel along the French coasts from the Belgian border to the confines of Normandy is naturally of interest. Amazing indeed is the number of natural and architectural beauties we are invited to fly over: the Opal Coast, the Bay of the Somme, the old town of Dieppe and its castle, the Mont-Saint-Michel - and these are only a few examples. But that is precisely where the shoe pinches: we are given to see zillions of sights, each one more beautiful than the other, far too many actually for a 52-minute screening time. Moreover, they are almost exclusively shown from the sky, so with a great distance, leaving in the shade the human beings who populate these places. Well, for sure, the director « overviews » the subject in both senses of the term.
Moreover, when Gilles Kebaïli, the director, decides to bring us closer to the inhabitants, he resorts either to archival footage (we are interested in the words of the philosopher Michel Onfray or Gérard Fusberti, Jacques Prévert's friend but they are taken from previous sources). And when he does not do that, he is content to film parachute jumpers, golfers and other sportsmen: aren't there people who put their region in a better light than all these fellows, who are certainly nice but who are only entertaining themselves, which all amounts, cinematographically speaking, to padding out.
If you are well-disposed, you can still get a minimum of pleasure out of this superficial travelogue and its images, assuredly beautiful but frustratingly fugitive.
To make us travel along the French coasts from the Belgian border to the confines of Normandy is naturally of interest. Amazing indeed is the number of natural and architectural beauties we are invited to fly over: the Opal Coast, the Bay of the Somme, the old town of Dieppe and its castle, the Mont-Saint-Michel - and these are only a few examples. But that is precisely where the shoe pinches: we are given to see zillions of sights, each one more beautiful than the other, far too many actually for a 52-minute screening time. Moreover, they are almost exclusively shown from the sky, so with a great distance, leaving in the shade the human beings who populate these places. Well, for sure, the director « overviews » the subject in both senses of the term.
Moreover, when Gilles Kebaïli, the director, decides to bring us closer to the inhabitants, he resorts either to archival footage (we are interested in the words of the philosopher Michel Onfray or Gérard Fusberti, Jacques Prévert's friend but they are taken from previous sources). And when he does not do that, he is content to film parachute jumpers, golfers and other sportsmen: aren't there people who put their region in a better light than all these fellows, who are certainly nice but who are only entertaining themselves, which all amounts, cinematographically speaking, to padding out.
If you are well-disposed, you can still get a minimum of pleasure out of this superficial travelogue and its images, assuredly beautiful but frustratingly fugitive.