La Baie des anges (1963)

La Baie des anges is a French romantic film drama first released in 1963, directed by Jacques Demy.  The film stars Jeanne Moreau, Claude Mann, Paul Guers, Henri Nassiet and André Certes.  It has also been released under the title: Bay of Angels.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Jean Fournier is a modest young bank clerk living in Paris.  He is sensible, respectable, and so it is with reluctance that he agrees to accompany his friend Caron to a casino.  When he wins a small fortune at roulette, Jean immediately becomes hooked on gambling and makes a snap decision to spend his holiday in Nice – much to the disgust of his father who believes that he will ruin himself.  Arriving in Nice, Jean wastes no time and heads for the gambling tables, where he meets an alluring blonde named Jackie.  She is a compulsive gambler who has abandoned her comfortable bourgeois milieu, her husband and her children, and lives a life that is dictated by the whims of the roulette wheel.  With virtually no money left, she places one final bet – with Jean’s advice.  When she wins, Jackie is convinced that Jean will bring her good luck and clings to him.  For his part, Jean is intoxicated by love for this strange woman, and gambles away his own money to be with her.  One minute they are as rich as kings; the next they are down to their last few hundred francs.  Will their fate together be determined by the spin of the roulette wheel…?

Jacques Demy followed his first full length-film, Lola (1961) with this comparatively anodyne tale of love and obsession in the gambling halls of Nice, a far more conventional kind of film for the time, but still unmistakably New Wave in its look and feel.   La Baie des anges is a noticeably darker, more ironic, film than Lola, showing us a bleaker side of human experience, a relentless portrayal of compulsive behaviour.  It is also a film about corruption – how a decent young man is seduced first by gambling and then by a self-centred older woman – and ultimately redemption, so there is a surprising resonance with the films of Robert Bresson.

Jeanne Moreau is perfect casting for the role of the perverse femme fatale and turns in a portrayal of caprice and obsession that echoes the one seen in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962) – there is the same intensity, dangerous spontaneity, predatory sexuality and lingering sense of mystery.  Next to her, Claude Mann is the ideal complement – an ordinary, down-to-earth young man who makes an easy prey but who looks as though he has what it takes to save the seemingly doomed Jackie.  Both actors bring an emotional depth and poetry which is perhaps lacking in the script – poetry which Michel Legrand’s aching music and Jean Rabier’s beautiful black and white photography can only emphasise.  All these ingredients work together perfectly, vividly conveying the alternating moods of elation and despondency that follow the outcome of a game of roulette.  The film’s ending is cruelly abrupt but it is also a masterstroke: it portrays the triumph of human will over chance, with the suddenness that mirrors Jackie’s insanely spontaneous character.

As Jean Vigo shows in his film, A propos de Nice (1930), the town in which the film is set is one of extreme contrasts, poverty and wealth living side-by-side.  The main location is just one device that Demy uses well to convey the extreme mood swings that punctuate the life of a compulsive gambler.  This can be seen most starkly in his use of tonal variation in the crisp black and white photography.  Jeanne Moreau is a platinum blonde here (with hair so white that it fluoresces); like her co-star, she appears in clothes that are either very light or very dark – there are few in-between tones.  The sets likewise alternate between the drab (dinghy hotel rooms, dark back streets) and the glamorous (a glitzy hotel suite, wide boulevards, sunny beaches), again creating a sense of interminable seesaw mood changes.  As a result, the film has a grittiness, a tough love realism which is far less apparent in Demy’s subsequent, better known films.

© James Travers 2005

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