CALIFORNIA MOVIE JOURNAL (January 2022)

[Chris Knipp]

BAY OF ANGELS/BAIE DES ANGES (Jacques Demy 1963). Not to be confused with Manuel Pradal's 1997 Marie Baie des anges (in the Favorite Films section). I don't know if it's right to say this is "like a French effort to purify, to get to the essence of, a Warners movie of the thirties" as Kael says in her enthusiastic New Yorker thumbnail review, but she grasps the beauty and perfection of this glittering little portrait of the glamour and destruction of gambling addiction. Everyone rightly dwells on Jeanne Moreau's platinum blonde roulette diva but they miss the importance of her impromptu ingenue male partner, Jean Fournier (Claude Mann), the young bank employee who gets the gambling bug from his colleague and winds up at Cannes and Monte Carlo with "Jackie" (Moreau). Mann is easy on the eyes too: tall, lean, chiseled, loose limbed, slightly resembling Steve McQueen, he is essential to the success of this relentless journey to hell and back with its ambiguous happy ending. Jean gets the bug bad, especially when he falls for Jackie, but we feel he could return to his senses while she can't and that saves this surprisingly elegant and restrained melodrama from teetering into hysteria. This to me is another profoundly distasteful subject, like adultery in Malle's La Peau Douce, but a beautiful film. It shows the irrationality of gambling in a pure form. I have to add Jean Rabier to the list of wonderful Nouvelle Vague cinematographers along with Nestor Almendros and Raoul Coutard. This which I had never seen is both painful to watch and continuous aesthetiC pleasure. Criterion Channel.