La baie des anges - Jacques Demy encore

Jean Fournier, a young bank clerk, is taken to a casino by his colleague Caron. Luck is on his side, as he wins. Now that he’s got a taste for it, he travels to the Côte d’Azur to try his luck further in the casinos there. In Nice, he meets the slightly older Jackie, a glamorous woman who has sacrificed everything for gambling. A deep bond develops between the two, which blossoms into a romantic relationship. Together they travel from casino to casino to see where their luck will take them.

In this romantic drama, written by director Jacques Demy himself, the female lead is played by the French star actress Jeanne Moreau, who had made a great impression a year earlier in François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. An American critic wrote of Moreau’s performance in La baie des anges: “With unwavering artistic talent, she transforms her director’s intimate essay into a glittering vehicle to display her four-octave dramatic range.”