Renée known as Guinguette, a former prostitute , earned enough money on the Parisian sidewalk to be able to buy her dream: an open air dance hall by the water. Her new lover, Marco, offers to use an unused adjoining barn to store used cars in which he deals. But the "opportunities" are actually stolen cars, and the charming Marco, a bad boy.
With a good cast , fine lines by Henri Jeanson, this is a nostalgic look at the guinguettes ,those open air dance halls which had begun to disappear in the late fifties ,a place depicted by the masters of the French cinema ,Jean Renoir ("une partie de campagne" ) Julien Duvivier ("la belle équipe" ) and Jacques Becker ( "casque d'or") ; Jean Delannoy is not to be mentioned in the same breath as them,but he was a solid craftsman ,as well as one of the bêtes noires of the notorious New Wavelet .
Zizi Jeanmaire ,essentially a dancer , is not exactly the character (the Arletty of the late fifties nohow) but she manages quite well ;the stand out is definitely Paul Meurisse who blows everyone off the screen every time he comes up ;on the other hand ,Italian B movie starlet Cristina Gaioni puts on her Brigitte Bardot act ,but only BB is BB, and her exaggerated swagger makes her a caricature of a nymphomaniac ;too bad for her character is not unlike Danielle Delorme's in Duvivier's highly superior "voici le temps des assassins " (1956) the best scenes of which took place in a guinguette too ; she's a sex kitten ,but she's pure evil too :don't we learn that her grandma's fall in the stairs was perhaps not an accident?
Half comedy and half drama ,it's certainly watchable even though the guinguettes have become a thing of the past.
