Hitchin’ a Ride: Deceased Artiste Agnès Varda (part 2 of two)

In 1970 Varda’s film Nausicaa was considered unairable by ORTF, the network that commissioned it, and so we have only a rough cut of the film to view. It is available to be seen on the Rarefilmm site.

It’s a blend of documentary and fiction that is very much the sort of film being made by “radicalized” French filmmakers of the time — this mixture was used wonderfully in two brilliant, controversial films, Sweden’s I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) and Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971). The rough cut of Nausicaa definitely could have used additional editing, but it appears to be a finished work, albeit without credits.

The film is Varda’s most overtly political, concerning the military dictatorship of “the Colonels” in Greece in the Sixties; she referred to Nausicaa as a “settling of accounts” with a “fascist” government. Varda reconnected to her Greek heritage here (her father was Greek), as she did in her short “Uncle Yanco” (1967). Talking heads, including Vasilis Vasilikos (the author of the novel Z), speak about being exiled outside of Greece.

Meanwhile, a fictional plot involves a Greek journalist staying at the apt of two roommates named “Agnès” (France Dougnac) and “Rosalie” (Agnès’ daughter’s name; played by Myriam Boyer, from Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000). As with Lion’s Love, the film is a time capsule of the late Sixties that is valuable for its glimpse at Varda’s politics. One rather timely reflection on military policy is passed on when a character intones that “torture is politics in another form.”

In the book Agnès Varda: Interviews (edited by T. Jefferson Kline, University Press of Mississippi, 2014). Varda speaks in a 1975 interview with Mireille Amiel on the matter of Nausicaa: “We shot the film… But in 1970 France sold a lot of Mirage planes to the colonels, so… The film was never broadcast on French TV. There were invitations from festivals but the film was never sent. No one ever wrote to me about its status…. They paid me, but I didn’t have the rights to the film…. That was the only time I’ve been politically censured.” [p. 72]

A young Gerard Depardieu in Nausicaa.

Varda’s only fiction film in the Seventies was One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), which I will review upon its upcoming re-release on Criterion. One of her most interesting credits from this decade was her credit on Last Tango in Paris (1972). She wrote the French dialogue, which means that she refined the initial dialogue between Brando and Schneider (which Marlon altered and dropped, in place of his own, errant remarks) and between Schneider and Jean-Pierre Leaud, who plays a wonderful satire on a New Wave cinephile-filmmaker who is not attentive to his girlfriend (and future wife).

The very small in scope fiction film Documenteur (1981) was based on her experience of living alone in L.A. (while her marriage was to Demy was broken up) with her son Mathieu. It is available in the U.S. on the Eclipse/Criterion box set Agnès Varda in California. I reviewed the contents of the box here on the Disc Dish website.

Varda’s last two movie masterpieces delved into homelessness and loneliness. The first is the superb fiction film Vagabond (1985), with Sandrine Bonnaire as Mona, a hitchhiking drifter who is found dead at the film’s opening.

Varda directing Vagabond.

In an interview with Francoise Wera in 1985, Varda outlined how she devised the film: “I went to scout out the terrain, if I may put it that way. I picked up hitchhikers, I hung out at the train station, I went into some of the homeless shelters at night, etc. One day I picked up a girl hitchhiking and she was so extraordinary a character that I began to realize how much more interesting it is to see a girl hitchhiking than a guy…. It presupposes more physical courage, more endurance, more guts, a greater capacity to say ‘up yours!’ to people, and that kind of thing.” [ibid, p. 120]

Varda uses a documentary frame for her drama — a device that has now been done to death in “mockumentary” sitcoms but was more unique back in the Eighties. We hear from people who have encountered Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) and have distinct opinions about her, emphasizing one of the film’s unspoken themes — the ways in which one life affects others, even if that life was lived on the margins (and some of the “witnesses” only meet her for a few minutes).

The most moving aspect of the film is that Varda and Bonnaire collaborated to make Mona a sympathetic character who has countless flaws — among them that she can’t be trusted not to steal or disappear and that she is, as one character puts it, “wild and unwashed.” Varda’s own description of the character is that she is “not engaging” but is still very “touching.” [ibid, pp. 142-43]

The film also picks up on the tone of Cleo and Bonheur by exploring the sad and lonely aspects of Mona’s personality. Her fate is predicted by a hippie farmer she meets who reflects on his old friends that stayed on the road, noting that “the loneliness ate them up in the end.”

The script is definitely Varda’s best, as it slowly weaves the “witness" characters together. Thus, what could be a resolutely corny device instead becomes a poignant statement on the fact that the world can be quite small, even if you’re a drifter. And even though they are all, by necessity, supporting characters, we get three-dimensional portraits of the people who comment on Mona’s life. One of the most striking is a middle-class tree expert, played by Macha Meril (Godard’s A Married Woman). Varda commented on the character in a 1986 interview by Barbara Quart:

“… later on she has a guilty feeling that she should, she could, have done more. To tell the truth, I don’t know what more she could have done. I don’t think she was ready to adopt that vagrant — who, by the way, would not have been pleased to be adopted. So sometimes a film pushes toward the wall where we have to face the limits of our vague understanding, vague generosity, and vague not understanding what it’s all about. So I ended up structuring the film into the shape of an impossible portrait.” [ibid, p. 136]

Varda made a few more fiction features, but Vagabond is the last truly great one. One of the factors that make it a timeless piece is Varda’s return to her neo-realist roots, with non-professional actors being used for small parts. The use of such real faces makes the documentary aspect click and attaches us emotionally to Mona, as the dirtied-up Bonnaire fits perfectly among the rustics and fellow drifters she plays against.

*****

Varda made entertaining documentaries and essay films for the last quarter century of her life. The one that stands head and shoulders above the rest is The Gleaners and I (2000), which has an intimate visual style, a cast of colorful “characters,” curious tangents, and a timeless theme. The advent of lightweight video cameras made it easier for Agnès to hit the road and pursue her theme by looking for people who live a lifestyle outside of society.

That lifestyle involves living off of the food cast off by others, be they bourgeois in cities who waste large amounts of food (and obey stringent expiration dates calculated to get the customer to buy more products) or the rural landowners whose harvests leave behind lots of uneaten produce.

The theme is broad enough that she is able to discuss the urban homeless problem in Gleaners while also tackling the notion of those who live in trailers in the countryside and — her favorite latter-day obsession, peculiar souls with unusual hobbies and artistic outlets.

As a result, she follows several unforgettably eccentric characters whom another filmmaker would’ve depicted as “desperate” or “people to be pitied.” Varda instead exults in their strangeness and never criticizes them (even those who are clearly on self-destructive paths).

Gleaners struck a chord with viewers in many countries and became the signature film of the last two decades of her life. It also spawned a new fan base for her, who sent her letters and presents and whom she acknowledged in the film’s sequel, The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002).

This sequel, which was included with the original feature on DVD in many countries, led the way to Varda’s final “memoir” documentaries, in which she presented us with an autobiography of sorts while also promoting the work of artists she liked.

Like her trilogy of films about Demy — Jacquot de Nantes, The Young Girls Turn 25, and The World of Jacques Demy — the memoir films are charming but have much less emotional resonance than the films examined above. They all are pleasant viewing experiences but will unfortunately suffer if one plans to “binge” her work and starts with the sublime fiction films, which are indisputably her finest work.

Of course, this is all relative to other filmmakers’ final films, which cast an emotional look backward to youth or middle age, or ponder the mysteries of life with metaphors for the Big Sleep (Fellini’s ladder to the skies is one of the finer ones). Varda’s video memoirs concentrate on beaches and the open road — which is as good a place to end as any.

*****

Two final videos. Both lack English subtitles, but the second is fully comprehensible. The first finds Agnès with a fan — Isabelle Huppert — being interviewed on the radio.

And a wonderfully assembled seven-minute montage of Varda’s themes, visuals, and performers:

Thanks to Paul Gallagher, cinéaste supérieur.

Agnès from 26 to 41: Deceased Artiste Agnès Varda (part 1 of two)

Incorrectly dubbed “the godmother of the French New Wave” and (one she particularly disliked in later years) “the grandmother of the French New Wave,” Agnès Varda wasn’t an inspiration for la nouvelle vague, she was a functioning member of the movement, in “the Left Bank group” with Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Her films existed in dialogue with the works of the other filmmakers, but she was one of them, rather than a remote “mother” figure.

Her own thoughts about her connection to the group can be found in the book Agnès Varda: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2014): “I was in the wave of the New Wave…. The baton was passed on in that way with some common tendencies, like making low-budget films with characters walking through the streets of Paris.” [pp. 116-17]

Her status as the only woman filmmaker in the group distinguished her, but what one is most struck by when seeing her films in a row is that they fell into two distinct categories: the documentaries, which had an optimistic, playful air, and her fiction features, which were downbeat and very honest about the emotional toll of loneliness and falling in and (more devastatingly) out of love.

She shared with the other New Wave filmmakers a knowledge of, and a passion for, the other art forms (she became a cinephile only after she made her first feature). Her background as a photographer informed her films, to the degree that one is still startled by the compositions and the way in which she favored both arresting montages that moved the pilot forward and leisurely traveling shots that provided atmosphere and indicated the duration of her characters’ journeys.

Varda’s fiction filmography was quite unique among the New Wave because her films belonged to different genres (and approaches to drama). She only made films when she wanted to — she was a working photographer throughout most of her life, and so made movies solely when she had a new story to tell.

One of the ways in which Varda was a pioneering figure is that she was the first to make a fiction feature (Resnais, Marker, Rivette, and Rohmer had already made their first shorts). La Pointe Courte, made in 1954, is most certainly the work of a talented photographer, as its narrative is primarily conveyed by the images.

It’s a hybrid work. One strand of the film overlaps with the work of the Italian Neo-realists — which Varda swore she never encountered until her editor on the film, Alain Resnais, pointed out the similarity of her work to films by Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni. This strand follows the daily lives of fishermen who catch shellfish in a lagoon that has been declared off-limits by the government (because its fish might be poisoned). These segments of the film are precise and documentary-like, and are the first time that Varda demonstrated one of her trademarks — finding amazing faces with which to tell her story.

The other strand concerns a woman (Silvia Monfort) who visits the small seaside town to tell her lover (an incredibly young and thin Philippe Noiret) that she wants to break up with him. These segments are the opposite of the neo-realist fishermen scenes and are instead filled with beautiful compositions — Varda was first and foremost a photographer until the Sixties — and some overripe dialogue (“We’ve lost the youth of our love.”).

Said Varda about this strand in the film: “I didn’t make it easy for the spectator to identify with them in a ‘warm’ way. Thus the coldness is the distance that I wanted between them and the audience. And one senses the photography since when one feels distance he becomes a voyeur and one looks at the image itself.” [ibid, p. 62.]

The scenes featuring the lovers are truly fascinating, in that they have the same tone as later parodies of Bergman – except, of course, for the fact that the classic Bergman visual style (and Antonioni’s equally “alienated” visuals) had not been forged in ’54 when Varda made La Pointe Courte. Bergman had already started his stylization with Summer Interlude (1951), Summer with Monika (1953) and Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) but was still rooted in more conventional modes of melodrama. 

Varda even uses the famous “two faces as one” diptych composition (with one subject turned to the side, as the other looks straight ahead) that became a signature shot in Bergman’s Persona (1966). Varda wasn’t quoting other films here, so she most surely was quoting photography (she was a working photographer at the time she made the film) and classical art (she studied at the School of the Louvre for four years).



The photographic quality of the visuals and the extremely melodramatic dialogue in Pointe makes for the kind of mannered filmmaking that is now drubbed by oh-so-hip film theorists, critics, and fans, but Varda’s sincerity is what “sells” the film, as uneven and schizophrenic as it is. She is clearly not kidding, and the experimentation she undertook led to the unforgettable visuals in her finest films.

Eight years later, Varda’s second feature, Cleo from 5 to 7, was released. Cleo is a work of assured brilliance that remains one of her best-known films. While its visuals mark it as a “Sixties movie,” the assured direction, soundtrack, and storytelling make it a timeless work that looks backward to French and American dramas of the Thirties and Forties but also ahead to the low-key character studies made by independent filmmakers in the years to follow.

Her masterstroke with Cleo is the way in which the title character (played by Corinne Marchand) is sketched. As the film begins, she is a self-absorbed pop singer whose life is subsidized by a sugar daddy character we (and she) see only briefly. By the midpoint of the film, though, we sympathize with her as she awaits the results of a test for cancer.

She is radiantly pretty and incredibly spoiled, but Varda’s camera assumes her POV as the film moves on — in quiet, beautifully shot scenes where she wanders the streets and cafes of Paris — thus softening our perspective on the character. Varda noted: “From the looked-at subject she becomes the looking subject.” [ibid, p.73] “… the entire dynamics of the film centers on the moment this woman refuses to be this cliché, on the moment when she no longer wants to be looked at, but wants instead to look at others and becomes the looking subject.” [p. xiii]

Her bonding with a nerdy soldier (Antoine Bourseiller) waiting to go to the Algerian War makes her fully sympathetic, as he, too, is facing possible death and has no control over the situation. And the way she eventually learns of the test result is so arbitrary and tossed off by the doctor that one definitely gets the feeling of chance ruling all our lives.

The sequence that links Cleo decisively to the other debut features of the New Wave is the moment when Cleo watches a silent comedy with a friend. The cast of the film-within-a-film includes Jean-Luc Godard, his muse Anna Karina, Eddie Constantine, and Jean-Claude Brialy.

Varda’s next feature was the equally tightly scripted Le Bonheur (1965), a devastating depiction of a thoroughly “ideal” family. The visuals are superb, but even more impressive is the economy of Varda’s storytelling and the beautiful way she delivers each character’s perspective.

The film integrates visual experimentation into the story of a happy family. Francois, a young husband-father (Jean-Claude Drouot) travels to another city for work and falls in love there. He believes his happiness has been doubled, but we know that his newfound formula for bliss will harm one of the women he loves (never mind his two kids). His girlfriend in the other town (Marie-France Boyer) is aware that he’s married, but when his wife learns about the other woman things are changed forever, and the “perfect family” is transformed (but looks and behaves pretty much the same — one of Varda’s more brilliant strokes).

While this tale is being told, Varda utilizes a palette of primary colors, fading to these colors in between scenes. She also uses the same graceful camerawork that was in her first two features, with the camera pirouetting around the characters.

Varda was thus experimenting visually as Godard was at the same time, but in the service of telling a very linear story. What does the story mean? Those who look to connect the lives of artists to their work could relate the film's plot to the fact that Jacques Demy, Varda’s husband, was bisexual, and thus Le Bonheur can be seen as a covert allegory about sharing one’s lover and the inevitable heartache that must occur. (In her 2008 film The Beach of Agnès, she revealed that the split between the two around the turn of the Eighties occurred because Demy left her for a man.)

Le Bonheur brings up issues about the Varda-Demy union. First is the unspoken fact that Varda’s output was more consistently top-notch. After The Pied Piper (1972), Demy lost his footing and recovered it only once with the uneven but absorbing Une Chambre en Ville (1982). The films that are not available in the U.S. on disc are indeed remarkably disappointing, from A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973) to the dismal Orpheus update titled Parking (1985) and Three Seats for the 26th (1988). (I made a point to see each rarity when they played at a complete Demy-fest at the Film Forum a few years back, and the effect is that of a very sad and a very steep downslide in quality.)

The other factor relates to the tone of their work. As can be easily seen, Varda placed melancholy and loneliness at the forefront in her films, while Demy’s upbeat, beautifully designed masterworks of the Sixties have an underpinning of great sadness that lurks behind even the happiest of veneers. For instance, his happiest-ever musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), has a jarring subplot in which a murderer is on the loose in the town. Varda’s best films are, by comparison, “smaller than life,” with sadness placed front and center. There is thus a greater sense of illusory fantasy in Demy’s films and a reservoir of true emotion in Varda’s.

Those who prefer looking at an artist’s work on its own, without connections to the author’s life, will see in Le Bonheur a knowing comment on the “free love” concept (which hadn’t reached its peak “summer of love” visibility yet but had indeed been a part of the “beat” lifestyle for several years before the film). It also is a way of bringing attention to the lives of supporting characters in a drama – although Francois feels certain that his having two loves makes everyone happy, we are constantly aware that there are other people who will be affected by his decision (and the wife, whose seamstress business is run from the family apartment, is a supporting character who is seminal to the plot but gets less screen time than the lover).

To make the film even more complicated on a dramatic level, Varda took the unusual step of casting a real couple – Jean-Claude and Claire Drouot — and their kids as the family in the movie. This is discussed in the supplements on the French DVD release of the film. Jean-Claude was a professional actor, best known for a French action TV series titled “Thierry la Fronde.” He happily notes in a present-day interview with Varda (conducted in 2006) that he has been married to Claire for 42 years. He says that “paradoxically, the film has invited us to succeed as a couple and family.” He also notes that his character was indeed “selfish” about his own desire.

Claire was a non-professional who was cast by Varda to create an air of verisimilitude. She notes that her personal reaction to the plot was “I just [hoped] it wouldn’t happen to me!” The startling ending of the film, where the husband’s mistress is now his wife and she participates in an idyllic picnic with Francois and the children, was discussed by Varda in interviews. Most viewers take the scene in which the wife is found drowned to mean that she committed suicide because of her husband’s newfound love. Varda, in fact, left open the fact that she might have died by accident. Boyer says that she thinks “[the wife] just fell in,” but Claire Drouot, who played the role, responds quickly, “I don’t!”

Varda's next feature, Les Creatures (1966), is a fascinating work and yet doesn't quite gel for me, so it will factor into future discussions of her work and not this one. It does, however, illustrate the point about Varda's features being unalike — Les Creatures is a sci-fi scenario that was, as she once noted, the one film she made that had major French stars in it (Deneuve and Piccoli —the latter also starred in her equally adventurous but uneven One Hundred and One Nights) and was her biggest flop at the box office.

Varda and Demy both made features in L.A. in the late Sixties while both were there to discuss making studio-backed films. Demy did indeed get a contract — his Model Shop (1969) is a sorta-sequel to Lola that has some wonderful views of L.A. at the time it was made. Varda went her own way and did an independent feature funded by producer Max Raab.

The resulting film, Lion’s Love (1969), is one of her most curious creations, a time capsule of the period it was made in that it is filled to capacity with ideas and statements about art in the movie capital of the U.S. Varda’s own, stalled conferences with studio execs are presented as problems endured by legendary underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke, who plays a variation on herself (but enduring Agnès’ real-life problems).

I’ve written about the film twice and so I will include here my summation of Lion’s Love in a review of the Eclipse box of Varda’s California films, as it appeared on the Disc Dish website.

The centerpiece of the box is the wonderfully messy fiction film Lions Love (… and Lies) (1969). Feeling inspired by the times, Varda made a Warhol-esque (or, more accurately, a Morrissey-esque) improvised feature. The resulting time capsule is by turns abrasive and brilliant.

The plot, such as it is, involves a menage a trois between three hippies, played by the co-librettists and lyricists of Hair, Jerry Ragni and Jim Rado, and Warhol superstar Viva. They are visited by underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke (playing herself), who is in L.A. to make a deal with a major studio to shoot her first mainstream movie.

It is never expressly stated onscreen, but the most intriguing aspect of the picture is that Varda let loose three NYC chatterboxes in sunny, laidback L.A. The above-mentioned “plot” is nowhere as interesting as the film’s many tangents, which include a number of car trips in which we get an eye-catching view of L.A. in 1968 — thus linking Lions Love to Model Shop (1969), the contemporaneous film by Varda’s husband Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) that also gives the viewer a terrific driving tour of Southern California.

Movie buffs in particular will be fascinated by the Hollywood car-tour sequence narrated by film historian Carlos Clarens, which includes an amazing exploration of the posters and stills available in Larry Edmunds Bookshop.

The most valuable segment of the film, though, is one that was not anticipated while the film was initially conceived: our three loquacious protagonists wind up glued to their TV, watching the news coverage of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, the ensuing TV tributes to Kennedy, and his televised funeral. Given the way that celebrity deaths are now covered in the era of 24/7 news networks, it’s chillingly prescient to hear Viva say at one point that our “national pastime is televised death.”

To be continued…

As a finale for this part of the entry, I give you a video posted just the other by Varda’s production company, Cine-Tamaris, a compilation of Agnes dancing (yes, there will be disco!):

Melody and melancholy: the Jacques Demy festival at the Film Forum, now until Oct. 17

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.

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: