Bay of the Angels

Bay of the Angels is a French film about two people who play roulette, all the time. Like its American counterparts about pool and poker, this could have been a tight, dirty little movie about people whose lives are built around gambling. Or it might have used the casino-world as a background for sharp social criticism. Working from both conceptions, director Jacques Demy tries to support a statement about psychology, love, and the malaise of Western Europe on the spindle of the spinning black wheel. But because Demy presents neither the development of the characters nor the dynamics of the game, we cannot see much above or below the croupier's stubbled chin.

Superficially, Bay of the Angels is a hard film. Everything appears in stark black and white: the lines are sharp, the men wear only dark suits, the women white with bold black designs. Usually there is no music, few people, and little noise. Conversation is clipped. "You bought a car?" "Yes." "But not on your salary." I won 800,000 francs as Enghien. Don't tell my wife. Come along."

So the young bank clerk, Claude Mann, gets hooked on the game. He goes with his friend to a casino near Paris, where sounds echo off bleak, cold walls that resemble an early-morning subway station. Claude wins the equivalent of six months' salary in 10 minutes. He breaks with his tongue-clicking petit bourgeois father and takes off for the big time at Cannes.

In Cannes Claude picks up Jeanne Moreau in the classic style: they both win on number 17. They have streaks of luck, lose it all, then make a killing, and buy their way into the Jet Set. He gets a tux, she a couple of evening gowns, and they check into Monte Carlo. The luxury, like the poverty, seems hard: there are the same straight lines, the same stark blacks and whites, set off by the flickers of brocade and jewelry. But the hardness is unreal because it has no effect on the people within it. Jeanne lives only for the game and seems not to care whether she sleeps in the railway waiting room or in the Hotel de Paris. Claude, the son of the watchmaker, is impressed with the falseness of the luxury that existed before in movies and dreams. Yet he, too, outside the casino, is aloof from his surroundings: he might as well be back in Cannes' slums.

If the world outside the casinos is hard and unreal, the internal gambling life is distorted and uninteresting. Occasionally Jeanne and Claude make self-conscious speeches about why they gamble: because it is exciting, vital, and passionate (winning streaks get musical background). But by making his characters play a roulette of hunches, Demy ignores the great tension in gambling between the desire for rational control and the hope of accidental success. Claude and Jeanne never play a "system;" they win in runs on single numbers, at odds of 36-to-1. "Play 17," he tells her. "Why," she asks. "Why not," he answers. "And don't ask questions."

Demy wants us to accept this world of risks and hunches, of madness and winning rhythms. He fails, however, because he presents neither the people (who they are, where they come from, why they play) nor the dynamics of the game. His focus, his real point of interest, seems to lie somewhere outside the frame. His techniques, because they do not support a reality within the film, become mere gimmicks: hard lines surrounding emptiness and false-echoing silence that are relics of many recent European films.

The failure of Bay of the Angels is emphasized by the excellent short which preceds it. Lonely Boy, a 15-minute documentary on Paul Anka, displays the singer's world with wild irony. Interviews are shot full in the face, with quick cuts to the hands or facial features to support a verbal point. (Anke's manager: "The boy is great, simply great. We haven't seen such a talent in five hundred years." Anka: "I'm just using the talent I was given to make people happy.") The shots of Anka's performances are superb: a focus on the singer, his face, then a quick cut to a close-up of a screaming girls, which establishes the connection more immediately than if you had been there.

Loneliness pervades the documentary, for in Anka's world, as in that of the gamblers, the general surroundings are irrelevant. Anka suffers a particular kind of isolation, through the microphone, in front of the backstage rooms, and always on the road. Demy's film is also concerned with isolation, but at the end of it you feel that you've watched a forced cinematic exercise. Lonely Boy, in a small number of hectic minutes, leaves you with feeling that this is the way it must be.