BAY OF ANGELS

Shot in gleaming black and white and lushly scored by Michel Legrand, the ever-amazing BAY OF ANGELS dazzles: everything about it, from the sun-struck Côte d'Azur with its glittering casinos to the hardened ash-blonde glamour of Jeanne Moreau in a tight white suit, has a blinding intensity. Moreau plays a compulsive gambler who seduces a young bank clerk (Claude Mann) and drags him from casino to casino, from Nice to Monaco and back, as a mascot. One senses condescension in Pauline Kael's description of BAY as "a magical, whirling little film, a triumph of style"; when she asks, "What would this film be like without Jeanne Moreau?...The picture is almost an emanation of Moreau, is inconceivable without her," she is both right—it is one of Moreau's best performances—and off the mark: with or without Moreau, BAY OF ANGELS is resplendent. (Synopsis from James Quandt, TIFF Cinematheque.) 

"So existential, so romantic...The great beauty of [BAY] is the way the croupier's spiraling wheel becomes a metaphor not for life's randomness, but for its lack of permanence, its riskiness[:] [a] hardened demimondaine can bet on a number and suddenly abandon it to dash after her beloved —an ecstatic ending a few films later revealed as the cause of another heroine's melancholy." —Fernando F. Croce