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La Baie des anges
1963 Drama / Romance
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Credits
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Director: Jacques Demy
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Script: Jacques Demy
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Photo: Jean Rabier
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Music: Michel Legrand
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Cast: Jeanne Moreau (Jackie Demaistre),
Claude Mann (Jean Fournier),
Paul Guers (Caron),
Henri Nassiet (Mr. Fournier,
Jean's father),
André Certes (Bank manager),
Nicole Chollet (Marthe,
housekeeper),
Georges Alban,
Conchita Parodi (Hotel director),
Jacques Moreau,
André Canter,
Jean-Pierre Lorrain
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Country: France
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Language: French
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Runtime: 79 min; B&W
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Aka: Bay of Angels
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Summary
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 middleclass background, 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…?
Review
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 striking resonance with the films of Robert Bresson.
Jeanne Moreau is as perfect as ever as the slightly perverse femme fatale, with a
performance that is reminiscent of her previous appearance 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 perfect 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 emotional depth and poetry which perhaps is absent
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 colour (or rather shade, since
this is a black and white film). 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. All this is quite simple
yet it gets across the precarious, oscillatory nature of a gambler’s life with great effect.
Whilst, in narrative terms, it may be Demy’s least adventurous work, artistically La
Baie des anges has just as much to commend it as his other, better known, films
– and without a trace of the unfortunate “kitsch factor” that would slightly mar the director’s
later films.
© James Travers 2005
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