La Merveilleuse Visite

HG Wells' second novel became Marcel Carné's penultimate movie. A beautiful young man is found naked on a beach; he says he's an angel fallen from the skies, though his difficulties with mirrors and cameras and the way he puts the wind up the locals are more indicative of Dracula. In fact, he's all too angelic, and his presence provokes nothing but unhappiness and violence, until finally he changes into a seagull and flies away. The late Victorian whimsy of Wells' misanthropic allegory, transplanted to a modern-day Breton village, has the charm of the incongruous, and permits Carné to create another of his little 'worlds', a rural one, as dreamily unreal as any in his big-city melodramas. The angel, sexy, absolutely unattainable, is also characteristic.