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An iris-in on Jeanne Moreau exhaling a mighty puff of smoke is the opening movie-movie apparition, a mirage in the desert of Nice at dawn, the camera pulls back dizzyingly and Michel Legrand's score tinkles exultantly. The heroine is an industrialist's wife turned compulsive high-roller, she sports Marilyn Monroe's platinum bouffant and even a bit of her wiggle yet all the fur boas and cigarette holders cannot quite camouflage her air of ravaged desperation. The boy is a stolid Parisian bank clerk (Claude Mann) on the run from mundanity, still alarmed at how quickly the roulette wheel changes fortunes. Contrasting poles—he dons black suits and cautiously sees le jeu as "fun but limited," she favors blanched outfits and compares casinos to churches—bound by utter fear of "a sensible life with no risks or surprises." Not Dostoevsky's gamblers but Mallarmé's for Jacques Demy, a Nouvelle Vague pirouette on "the mystery of numbers and chance." Ups and downs on the Riviera, broke at breakfast and flush with luxury in the afternoon then broke again at dinner. Such extremes suit Moreau's reckless demimondaine, who glides imperiously from table to table, tossing chips and looking the other way. (Sadness cracks her insouciance when she remembers the son she left behind, "I feel like I gambled him away, too.") Lubitsch's Monte Carlo and Dieterle's Fog Over Frisco are among the modalities, Stevens' The Only Game in Town has the dilemma from another angle. The beauty of it is the way Demy makes the roulette stand not for the arbitrariness of life but for the unpredictability of love: The obsessive player lets it spin before dashing off after her paramour, one risky wager exchanged for another. Cinematography by Jean Rabier. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |