Film Forum

(1963) “I didn’t think women like you existed anymore.” A couple of hours at a casino at the behest of copain Paul Guers begins as just a Saturday diversion for uptight bank clerk Claude Mann, but after he wins, his vacation gets diverted to Nice’s Baie des Anges and a seat at the roulette table next to a platinum blonde Jeanne Moreau. And as they rollercoaster from scrounging for change to hotel suites, cars, and couture, and back again, amid reds, blacks, pairs, impairs, manques, passes, transversales á cheval, carrés and 35-1 shots, it seems life itself (“Here or Paris, it’s all the same. You have to be somewhere.”) is just a game of chance for Moreau – who’s already shed husband, child, and wealth for the table. Demy’s rarely-screened second film is a triumph of style, from Jean Rabier’s mobile camerawork amid sunsplashed Riviera location shooting, to Moreau, resplendently Bette Davisish in white lacy bustier (Moreau at the costume meeting: “Well, if that makes Jacques happy…”), to her entrance flashing across a succession of mirrors in the penultimate shot. DCP. Approx. 84 min.

Reviews

“What would this film be like without Jeanne Moreau? The picture is almost an emanation of Moreau, inconceivable without her.”
– Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

“Of all the performances that have made Jeanne Moreau revered among actresses, her work in Bay of Angels is one of the most compelling and one of the least seen... A mesmerizing, compulsively watchable performance, one of the few films roles you literally hold your breath watching.”
– Kenneth Turan, LA Times

“[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 Demy’s intimate essay into a glittering vehicle to display her four-octave dramatic range.”
– Eugene Archer, The New York Times

“An early chapter of Demy’s courtship with the provincial France of his youth, with the most bewitching generation of French actresses, and with movies.”
– Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice