Jacques Demy had one of the
most curious careers in cinema history. He is often cited as being a filmmaker
of the French New Wave but his work bears little resemblance to theirs – except
for his debut feature Lola (1961), and even that is a more
conventionally structured work than the early films of the nouvelle
vague directors. He made three utterly sublime musicals starring
Catherine Deneuve, but most of his other films are rarely revived, and the ones
that were released on VHS and disc have for the most part gone out of print (or
the companies releasing them went out of business).
Thus New Yorkers will get a rare treat when all thirteen of Demy's features will be shown at the Film Forum, running from today to October 17. I'm looking forward to the festival because it actually is two
retrospectives in one: the first is comprised of the Demy films that have
perennially been revived (these are the “essential” titles that everyone should
see); the second is the group of films that *never* play in repertory. This
latter group is the one that I'm eagerly anticipating, even though some of the
rarer titles are reputed to be wildly uneven (to be kind about it).
Here is a quick montage of
some of the livelier moments in Demy's films, compiled for a festival of his
work at the Cinematheque Francaise in April of this year:
Demy was born in the village
of Pontchateau and grew up in Nantes. After studying at the Technical College
of Fine Arts in that small town, and the Technical School of Photography in
Paris, he made a few short works, graduating to his first feature,
Lola, in 1961. In that film he established his
preoccupations: a broadly romantic love story, a simplistic plotline (one would
almost say a “fairy tale,” but he got to those later on), and a bittersweet
sadness underneath a cloak of gaiety.
His best films are all set in
locations other than Paris. The second feature, Bay of
Angels (1963), is a glamorous gambling drama starring Jeanne Moreau
that highlights the city of Nice. Bay is a very good film,
but its best moment happens right at the very opening:
Then came the trio of films
with Deneuve (with a sojourn in the U.S. coming between the second and third).
Here he took his love of American musicals and set to work evoking them while
still creating something original and uniquely French with the aid of the great
Michel Legrand. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) is his
masterpiece and the film by which the rest of his works are measured.
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It's a beautifully realized
creation that becomes more and more poignant as the years go by, since Demy was
evoking a type of musical that had died out by the time he made the film. In
the nearly five decades since its release the film itself has been cited
endlessly and has inspired a generation of European (and, in a cultural
cross-current, American) filmmakers who want to pay homage to the “great
musicals of the old days.”
The film has definitely
become a cornerstone of Deneuve's career – take for example her role as Bjork's
friend “Kathy” in the unsettling and brilliant Lars Von Trier musical
Dancer in the Dark (2000). More recently, Francois Ozon
evoked Demy's classic in Potiche (2010), with Deneuve
playing a woman who successfully takes over her husband's business (which just
happens to be umbrella-making).
Umbrellas
solidified the aspect that I consider the most striking and important thing in
his work – the bittersweet undercurrent that runs below all of his plots,
whether they are happily resolved or not. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes
and was undoubtedly the high point of Demy's career. He followed it with
another musical, one that is marvelously over the top.
The Young Girls of
Rochefort (1967) is a candy-colored, mega-hyper musical that finds
twins (Deneuve and her real-life sister Francoise Dorleac) in love – while a
sadistic murderer is at large. This last element is just a peripheral detail
that is brought up from time to time in the film, and it is the one aspect that
makes me certain that M. Demy possessed a definite air of melancholy (all
right, possibly even depression) in amidst his sunny optimism.
He clearly loved the cinema
of Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen, and Gene Kelly – who has a supporting role
in Rochefort and is terrific, despite some rather feeble
French dubbing provided for him (one needs to hear Kelly's gravelly, smiling
voice). Unlike his Hollywood heroes, however, Demy's best films all have an
acute sense of melancholy when they are not downright tragic (as in
The Pied Piper and Une chambre en ville).
This aspect is what makes
Demy's work so unique and rewatchable – Rochefort is just so
goddamned “up” that the murderer subplot serves to *ground* his
lighter-than-air ensemble. The score by Legrand is extremely catchy, and (for conceptual continuity purposes for the Funhouse), there is a moment in which
the twins dress and perform exactly like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in the
“Two Little Girls from Little Rock” number from Howard Hawks' Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes.
Here is the trailer:
After
Rochefort Demy's career started to go astray. I really like
his next film, Model Shop, but it is downbeat from start to
finish. It's an American remake of Lola (that functions
plot-wise as a sequel), with Anouk Aimee reprising her role from the original
film and Gary Lockwood playing her newest suitor.
When I interviewed Lockwood,
he noted that he didn't much enjoy shooting the film (which is evident onscreen
at points); he added that the film had received some kind of commendation in
the early 2000s as a “great film about L.A,” which it is – his character and
Aimee's ride around town, giving us an informal tour of what the city looked
like in 1968.
The film is not a musical,
but its soundtrack is memorable, as it blends orchestral music and tunes by the
band Spirit, who play themselves in the film.
Here is one of
the memorable “tour” scenes in the film:
Donkey
Skin (1970) was the third and final film Demy made with Deneuve. It's
an odd item that transforms a fairy tale into a musical with slightly
hipper-sounding tunes (Legrand was apparently in the mood to get some lounge
material out of this score). The plot concerns a king (Jean Marais) who wants
to marry his daughter (Deneuve); the film makes reference to Beauty
and the Beast by Cocteau in a few ways, including the casting of
Marais.
In true storybook
fashion, the film contains the recipe for baking a magic cake:
After the Deneuve musical
“trilogy” Demy's films weren't critical or popular hits. As his career went
into decline, his wife, Agnes Varda, went from strength to strength (due to the
variety in the subjects she covered in her work). But Demy continued to make
choices that resulted in great scenes, if not always terrific movies.
For instance in his next
film, the British production The Pied Piper (1972) starring
Donovan (performing his own songs acoustically, a major plus!), there is a scene that is *genuinely* creepy. At first glimpse the film
appears to be another Donkey Skin, intended for viewers of
all ages, but what would very little kids make of this lovely wedding party
scene?
Perhaps the strangest item in his filmography was his
return to filmmaking after six years in 1979 (after the failure of
Pied Piper and the 1973 Mastroianni-Deneuve comedy
A Slightly Pregnant Man). Lady Oscar was
a Japanese-produced adaptation of a manga about a woman who disguises herself
as a man and becomes Marie Antoinette's bodyguard before the French Revolution.
The film was in English with English stars, but was set in France and shot by a
French director. It has been one of five Demy films “lost” to American
audiences.
The Film Forum festival of
Demy's work contains two week-long runs, the second being a new restoration of
Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The first is yet another lost title,
Une chambre en ville (1982). This sequence – which, until
the advent of YouTube, had been available to American viewers in Varda's
documentary The World of Jacques Demy (1995) – is highly
operatic and make the film seem as if it was indeed a return to form for Demy.
Music... and heartache:
Chambre
is the most eagerly awaited of the lost Demy titles, but I am also very
interested to see what his odd-looking Eighties update of “Orpheus” called
Parking (1985) is like.
I've seen Demy's final film,
Three Seats for the 26th (1988), which is, again, thoroughly
charming, but a very strange (and none too credible) hybrid of reality and
fiction. Yves Montand plays himself, journeying back to his home town of
Marseille to perform at the opera house. While there, he relives parts of his
past, including a (fully fictional) fascination with the beautiful young
Mathilda May.
All that is
charming *and* all that doesn't work in the film (that synthesizer beat!) is
present in this scene from the beginning of the film:
One of the most touching
things about Demy's filmography is how it has been enriched by three films made
by his very loving wife, Agnes Varda. She has made one film dramatizing his
childhood (Jacquot de Nantes in 1991) and two documentaries about his
work (Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans and The World
of Jacques Demy). She also devoted major segments of her documentary
review of her life, The Beaches of Agnes (2008), to him.
While Mme. Varda was and is a
superb filmmaker (her disparate fiction features supplemented by a number of
documentaries and film shorts), her late husband did create his own instantly
recognizable “universe.” He definitely made some missteps after the Sixties,
but even his least works are enticing, as New Yorkers will be finding out for the next two weeks....
Some highlights,
assembled for the French DVD box set of his work:
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