... or one of them is the movement that pseuds insist on promoting to upper-case as The New Wave and I dismiss as the lower-case new wavelet but in life we can seldom pigeon-hole everything and Jacques Demy is a case in point; he is part of the hiccup only inasmuch as his early features were made just as the vague in question was retreating back into the ocean of mediocrity from whence it came. True, he made these early movies for a stick of gum and mostly on location but he possessed more flair for actual film-making than for intellectualising on celluloid. Nor was he above subtlety; there is, for example, a nice touch in this film when Claude Mann and Jeanne Moreau share a pint bottle of whiskey and the brand is Black and White reflecting the motif of the entire film; Moreau, the car, the beach are all white, Mann, the croupiers and virtually every other male are dressed in black. Plot-wise it's stripped to the bone; Mann is a straight-up guy, Moreau is Gamblers-in-yer-face. They meet. End of. On the other hand if you want to talk Theme how much time do you have. Nice makes a nice location, Michel Legrand weighs in with a pleasant jazz-inflected score and it's fine for one viewing and just for the record another of my bete noirs is wagering against the red at roulette.
Review of Bay of Angels
