Bay of Angels

Template:Short description Template:Infobox film/short description Bay of Angels (Template:Langx) is a 1963 French romantic drama film written and directed by Jacques Demy. Starring Jeanne Moreau and Claude Mann, it is Demy's second film and deals with the subject of gambling. The costumes were designed by Pierre Cardin.

The film was Demy's last shot in black and white, with his next film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), incorporating vivid colour.

Plot

Jean Fournier is a quiet young bank employee in Paris, living with his widowed father. After accompanying his colleague Caron to a casino and winning at roulette, he decides to have a holiday on the French Riviera, despite his father's warning that gamblers always lose in the end. In the casino in Nice, he meets Jackie Demaistre, a middle-aged woman who has left her husband and infant son to pursue her compulsion. The two develop an emotional connection, though she warns him that she will sacrifice anything to keep on gambling, not for the money, she claims, but for the thrill. As her remaining belongings are in a suitcase at the railway station, where she plans to sleep, he offers her his hotel room. They drink, talk, and make love.

Back in the casino, the two win a fortune with which, having bought a sports car and smart clothes, they take a suite in Monte Carlo and hit the tables there. Losing everything, they take the train back to Nice, where Jean convinces his father to send him some money. When this too is lost in the casino, Jean calls it a day and walks off, saying that he is returning to Paris. Hurt at this double rejection, of her and of their gambling partnership, Jackie angrily tells him to go. Shortly afterwards, she runs after him and the two embrace in the sunset.

Cast

• Jeanne Moreau as Jacqueline "Jackie" Demaistre
• Template:Ill as Jean Fournier
• Paul Guers as Caron
• Henri Nassiet as Monsieur Fournier
• Template:Ill as the bank director
• Template:Ill as Marthe
• Conchita Parodi as the hotel manager

Reception

Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned Bay of Angels a score of 76 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

Critics praised Moreau's performance, with Mann's being seen as weaker. For The New York Times, Eugene Archer wrote, "[Demy's] sympathetic film is handicapped by the casting of Claude Mann, whose tentative Jean proves too passive to carry the weight assigned him by the script. [...] The actress compenstates with a bravura demonstration of star power on the rampage. [Moreau] smolders, pouts, flounces, rages, giggles, suffers and claws, in an exhibition of cinematic personality reminiscent of Dietrich in her best "Devil Is a Woman" days. With unfaltering artistry, she transforms her director's intimate essay into a glittering vehicle to display her four-octave dramatic range."

In a 2015 retrospective, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote, "What would this film be like without Jeanne Moreau? Even if the dialogue and direction were the same, the meanings wouldn’t be. The picture is almost an emanation of Moreau, inconceivable without her. [...] His virtuoso sense of film rhythm turns this flimsy, capricious story about a gambling lady into a lyrical study in compulsion and luck. This is a magical, whirling little film, a triumph of style."

External links

• / at IMDbTemplate:EditAtWikidata
• Template:Wikidata/enwp Template:PAGENAMEBASE at the TCM Movie DatabaseTemplate:EditAtWikidata
• Bay of Angels review by The Village Voice
• Bay of Angels: Walking on Sand – an essay by Terrence Rafferty at The Criterion Collection

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