La Baie des anges

I was chilled to the bone, and mesmerized, by the dark crime of M (1931). Then, in the double-feature session, the 15-y-o boy trespassing as a 17-y-o, quickly changed his temperature when the 'great sinner' Jeanne Moreau appeared on La Baie des Anges (1963). «Actress Moreau forcefully demonstrates the verve, style and flamboyant femaless that make her the envy of European sex symbols much greener in years and cooler in blood. Her wicked, winning presence has saved a bad movie from utter oblivion, and at 36 she knows how to turn Bay of the Angels into a one woman show.» So wrote a reviewer (Time, November 27, 1964), and I couldn't put it better; I'm now copying this from my typewritten notes - no photocopier at home, then. That young boy would never enter a casino in his life due to this film, and he tried to see all the films starring Jeanne Moreau. I'm a winner on two counts, by money not given away to casino owners, and by a plethora of good films that were saved from oblivion by this great woman, and actress.

This film enters with a spectacular high speed tracking shot matched by the hyper circular theme song by Michelle Legrand that sounds both like spinning and falling, and which does indeed represent both the spinning of the roulette wheel and falling in love.

Here we have the side of Jeanne Moreau I don't care for, posey, game playing and artificial... the kind of woman men like and women hate... and that made her perfect in this role. (And her performance her is Infinitely BETTER than in EVA, same type role.) What I like a lot about her casting here is that she looks quite a bit like Marilyn Monroe, but is as different internally as anyone can possibly be - which a lot of the world was doing at this time, being bad Marilyn Monroe wannabees. I love that the platinum hair makes her look much more harsh, older, and very false, and that is, of course, the essence of the character. And this film is mainly a character study, with little story and little explanation.

Our leading man is the young naive everyman sucked into her world in all respects. We feel for his every bad decision, and this is a true and real representation of both the allure and the tawdriness of the gambling world.

Without giving anything away, the ending feels contrived, but in this time period, films wanted "endings"... today a truer ending would just go on spinning like the roulette wheel. Michel Legrand's score is great. Like many of Demy's films, this is a dark story of the current day told with musicality and attention to the games we play with ourselves.

This is a kind of interesting film. It has been overshadowed by later, greater works by Jacques Demy, such as Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, but at its heart it has pretty much the same themes - the difficulties of translating American modernity into French provincial life. Moreau has an unusual turn as an Americanised film star, complete with bleached blonde hair -do a la Marilyn Monroe, playing Jackie, a gambler on the Cote d'Azur. Jean, on holiday from his strict father, falls in love with her. This slight plot (that really is it!)is the background for meditations on chance, love, luck, and life. There are some virtuoso cinematic moments, such as Jackie running toward Jean being glimpsed in mirrors at the end of the film. The overpowering score is slightly grating, but all in all it's a charming period piece.

First a note of interest: Jeanne Moreau is in the movie, and she's the star, of course, but she's also a blonde here. Usually, from what I can remember from say The Lovers or La Notte or Jules & Jim it's dark or at least brunette. I wonder if she was already blonde at the time or if it was a deliberate and specific choice on director Jacques Demy's end. Because, somehow, it does add something extra to the character. When we first see her on screen she's being 'escorted' (kind word for kicked out) of a casino that Jean and Caron are at to start gambling, and it's a big scene where we see her arguing and stomping her feet and we barely see her face, just a fury of big blonde hair and attitude to match. It's not exactly the same cool presence one saw in some of Moreau's other big films of the period - and yet when we see her again she is lovely and with that face that charms immediately upon the smile, and makes one feel the gloom of after hours when looking serious.

Bay of Angels is a movie that works best when Demy focuses his theme on escapism, what would appear to be at first a film for escapists, about people going off to rich places like Monte Carlo and gambling away the life savings and having a great time in expensive suits and drinking champagne. But it's also about the nature of this escapism, the danger of it. It's predictable to see that Jean, who comes from a family where gambling is incredibly frowned upon, and Jackie, who at one point confesses that going into a casino is like going into Church, will lose a lot of money, maybe all of it, and keep going in dire straits throughout. What isn't expected is how Demy interweaves this seemingly endless back and forth of the bottomless pit that is a gambler's life (if only seeming like a lifetime in however few days Jean/Jackie are together) and how touching it becomes against the backdrop of glamour. At the least, his film is about something.

The only problems come with a few scenes in the script that drag - the dialog often works, but sometimes not quite enough to satisfy the emotional purpose of a scene. Maybe also contributing to this is first time actor Claude Mann as Jean. Mann would later be featured in Melville's Army of Shadows, among other notable films, but here he just can't hold his own most of the time alongside such a presence like Moreau. It was wise to cast someone young, and maybe not with the most experience, as this kid who goes on vacation from a small bank-clerk job to try and find himself by way of throwing away hundreds of thousands (albeit I pictured more-so, as the film went on, the actor who played the lead in Pickpocket). But Mann just doesn't really fit in, especially when he has to go into big dramatic scenes (i.e. the outbursts of anger against Jackie in the hotel rooms).

And yet Bay of Angels displays a director with an intuition with the camera, a grace and style, and a dazzling sense of music, precisely repetitive, over the shots of the roulette table spinning around and the faces dissolving in and out with it. There are beautiful moments, and it's hard not to take eyes ever off of Moreau, one of those actresses who keeps working today into her late 70s going on 80s but whom one thinks of in black and white only. She had/has one of the great faces in movies, and she's a damn good actress to boot. 7.5/10

Jean is a clerk in a bank. His colleague Caron is a gambler and gives him the virus. In the casinos, Jean meets Jackie. Their love affair will follow their luck at the roulette.

Jacques Demy was still early in his career at this point, having really only made one film, "Lola". He returns here to black and white and a non-musical, the second and last time he would do that. But he always told stories of love and this is no exception. (Some think he had his own take on Hollywood, but that is a whole other issue.)

Here gambling, especially roulette, is glamorized. At a time when gambling was run out of Cuba and was illegal basically everywhere in the United States besides Nevada, there is a sense of mystique about gambling that evokes thoughts of James Bond. This film captures that perfectly.