La Baie des anges
1963 Romantic Drama
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Credits
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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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