Manina, la fille sans voile (1952)
Directed by Willy Rozier

Film Review

Having launched the screen career of one Françoise Arnoul in L'Épave (1949), director Willy Rozier provided the same service for Brigitte Bardot in this equally turgid melodrama.  Manina, la fille sans voile is Rozier's best-known film, but this is only on account of its accidental association with Bardot.  Indeed, the film was only widely distributed outside France after the actress had been baptised a sex goddess in Roger Vadim's Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956).  At the time of its release, the film courted controversy with its salacious shots of Bardot posing provocatively in the skimpiest of bikinis, something that led the actress's father to pursue an unsuccessful court action to prevent the film's release. 

Even more ahead-of-its-time than this gratuitous teen sexploitation are the film's lengthy underwater sequences, which predate Jacques-Yves Cousteau's groundbreaking Le Monde du silence (1956) by four years and are truly remarkable for their time.  These, together with some impressive tracking shots across the picturesque Corsican landscape, accompanied by some authentic Corsican music, give the film a poetry which, had it been supported by a less flimsy narrative, would have made it a notable achievement.  Alas, Rozier's talents as both a screenwriter and director were sporadic and minimal, so whilst the film occasionally impresses with its cinematographic artistry, it fails to have much impact as a piece of drama and merely ends up falling into the worthless cleft between melodrama and erotica.

The plodding narrative is not helped by the fact that all of the characters are wafer-thin, and whilst the 17-year-old Bardot comes close to setting the film alight with her charm and vitality, her co-star Jean-François Calvé is dullness personified and looks too visibly like someone who was cast more for his muscled physique than his skill as an actor.  Howard Vernon's ambiguous character is the most interesting the film has to offer, but even this ends up as a borrowed archetype when the drama reaches its horribly predictable (and astoundingly badly realised) denouement.  Bardot's sizzlingly sensual presence will doubtless ensure that Manina, la fille sans voile will never be forgotten, at least not by devotees of low-grade erotica, and, deeply flawed as the film is, it still has its fleeting moments of brilliance.

Film Synopsis

Inspired by a lecture, hard-up student Gérard sets about recovering the lost treasure contained in a sunken Phoenician ship off the coast of Corsica.  With funds supplied by his fellow students, Gérard heads off for Tangier, where he persuades a cigarette smuggler named Eric to join him in his mad endeavour.  Whilst diving off the Lavezzi islands, Gérard gets to know Manina, the attractive daughter of the local lighthouse keeper...