Brandon's movie memory

A chronological romp through Varda’s life and work. Exciting and wonderful and gorgeous and traumatic and mischievous. More inter-intra-self-referential than even 101 Nights of Simon Cinéma, which of course this references more than once. The perfect summary and closer to Agnes Varda Month, and possibly to the great woman’s filmmaking career (we’ll see). I don’t feel like writing more – will catch up next time I watch it.

“We’re alone and we stay alone. But what counts is to want something… no matter what the cost. There’s a bit of happiness in simply wanting happiness.”

Oops, we were supposed to end Agnes Varda Month with Jacquot de Nantes but I couldn’t get the subtitles to work, so we watched Jacquot’s own Nantes-set first feature. Not a musical like we’d hoped, but a gorgeous widescreen black and white, slightly melancholic drama with a lovely Young Girls of Rochefort-reminiscent ending.

Our listless hero is Roland (Marc Michel of Le Trou), who just wants to get out of town until he meets his crush from a decade ago, dancer Lola (Anouk Aimée). He sticks around to see if anything will happen between them, but she’s not interested, waiting for her long-lost love (and father of her child), messing around with an American soldier (New Jersey native Alan Scott who speaks hilariously horrid French) in the meantime.

Separately, Roland and the soldier also meet a young teen girl named Cécile, and Roland meets her lovesick mother (Elina Labourdette of Bresson’s Les dames du Bois de Boulogne) who tries in vain to distract him from Lola. Roland kills time at his favorite cafe with a woman in her 60’s (one of the card players in La Rupture) who talks about her son who has been away for too long. Everyone turns out to be connected – she’s the mother of Lola’s missing boyfriend who returns home to them in the final scene – giving Nantes a small-town feel, but it’s made small through the characters, not by the crane shots which make Rochefort look like a stage set.

Demy’s cinema is interconnected: Lola returned in Model Shop and Roland is the guy who marries Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

NY Times: “Cécile, it’s worth mentioning, is Lola’s real name. All these people are to some degree reflections of Lola or her vanished lover, and part of the pleasure of the movie lies in watching Demy choreograph this intricate play of mirror images as the characters flicker past one another – sometimes recognizing themselves, fleetingly, but more often not.”

R. Bergan: “Its circular construction, frothiness, and long tracking shots are reminiscent of Max Ophüls, the film’s dedicatee.”

I think most Jacques Demy studies begin with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and end with The Young Girls of Rochefort, pausing to mention that he died young and was married to Agnes Varda. I enjoyed those two so much that I figured his other films couldn’t be that bad, so I checked this out since the video store didn’t have Lola. Not only is it not-bad, but I challenge anybody to find anything wrong with it.

Catherine Deneuve (the same year as Tristana) plays a young princess. A few months after her mother passes away, the king (Jean Marais, not looking too different 25 years after his other fairy-tale film, Beauty and the Beast), with no other attractive princesses in the land, decides to marry Catherine.

Funeral for a queen:

Catherine, a sheltered princess who spends her days with parrots and blue-painted dwarfs sees nothing wrong with this – after all, she loves her father. Fortunately, her fairy godmother Delphine Seyrig (the year after Mr. Freedom, and looking much classier) knows it’s a problem so gives Catherine a series of costume-design challenges to pose to her father to delay the wedding. When he passes them all, making her dresses the color of the sky, the moon and the sun, she asks for a dress made from the skin of the prize donkey which shits gold and jewels. Seems like a cruel slap at the kingdom, but he does it, and she flees for the country wearing the freshly-killed donkey.

Doing small-town drudge work in public, but secretly sleeping comfortably in her shack with some magical fairy help, Cath attracts the attention of Prince Charming (Jacques Perrin, who starred in Z after playing the military poet who is driving away in the final shot of Rochefort). He meets her, loses her, then does the Cinderella thing with all the girls in the land, only instead of a slipper it’s a ring that fits only her hand, and announces they are to be married.

Just then, a helicopter (!) drops in carrying the king, who is going to marry the fairy godmother – a hilarious ending to a story that started pretty dark (death, incest, donkey-killing).

Demy (in homage to Cocteau?) uses slow motion and reverse effects as cheap movie magic to enhance the fairy-tale atmosphere. Hmmm, and painted people hiding in the walls and Cocteau’s name in the credits and his leading man in the cast – I guess he was an influence after all.

Lovely music by Michel Legrand and lovely cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet, both returning from The Young Girls of Rochefort.

Dialogue that prefigures the helicopter:
CD: “Can a spell wear out like a dress?”
fairy godmother: “No, but it can weaken like a battery.”
“A battery? What is that?
“Nothing – I’m getting old!”
“But fairies don’t get old.”
“You’re right. I had forgotten.”

Also: birds galore… a giant stuffed white cat as a king’s throne… iris-fades to solid colors a la Le Bonheur… force fields… talking flowers… horses painted red… pretty much a must-see movie.

Not a total musical like “Umbrellas” was, and no connecting characters between the two, just a brief mention of the town of Cherbourg. This one has the same longing tone as the previous film in parts, but mostly it’s a much sunnier film, a loving, colorful, musical tribute to Hollywood escapist classics.

At this point, Demy was far out of touch tonally with his French New Wave contemporaries. “Umbrellas” characters were at least affected by the ongoing war, but “Rochefort”, coming long after “Muriel” and “Paris Belong To Us”, and after “The War Is Over”, is in its own insular world for the most part. A few years later, after the May ‘68 riots and Godard’s and Marker’s hard turns to the left, after even Demy’s wife Agnes Varda had filmed “Black Panthers” and contributed to the “Far from Vietnam” project, Demy would continue to go his own way, filming a musical fantasy fairy-tale with Deneuve and Jean Marais in 1970. By that point, I gather that he was not well-liked by his New Wave filmmaker/critic contemporaries. I don’t think he is well-liked still… I’ve been reading that his career was pretty uneven, and only a quarter of his films are talked about regularly. I guess Demy’s films have had to be recontextualized to be appreciated, removed from the radical French 60’s and enjoyed as pure cinema.

Danielle Darrieux (star of Madame De… and the cheating wife in La Ronde, later in 8 Women & Demy’s Une chambre en ville) plays Yvonne, mother of Catherine Deneuve, her tragic real-life sister Françoise Dorléac (of The Soft Skin and Roger Vadim’s La Ronde remake) and young Boubou.

Yvonne regrets having left Boubou’s father Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli) ten years ago. Delphine (Deneuve) keeps missing her dream man, an artist/poet doing his military service, Jacques Perrin (of Donkey Skin, Cinema Paradiso, the Kieslowski-penned 2005 Hell). Solange (Dorléac) dreams of meeting famous American composer Andy Miller (Gene Kelly). And they all (more or less) meet up and fall in love at the end of the movie.

Guess I’m not so musical-savvy, don’t know what to say about this one stylistically. I mean, it’s bright and colorful and fun, less sense of loss and longing than “Umbrellas”, but I kind of miss that. Gene Kelly is a cutie, fits in just fine.

Katy asks why the mother has to work all day at her diner to get by, while her daughters live high in their fancy apartment and pretty dresses from teaching song and dance lessons. Are the realism and the fantasy rubbing against each other uncomfortably, or is the mother paying for Boubou’s school and still helping to support the girls until they get married? If the latter, I’d hope they’d take a shift at the diner once in a while.

This and “Umbrellas” had a funny combination of set and location shooting, with Demy doing location shots in the actual towns, but repainting the storefronts to his liking. Nice music, nothing memorable for me, having heard it just once. The girls refer to “Jules and Jim” and composer Michel Legrand. The camera should count as a cast member since it is engaged by the other characters and dances around with them. A self-reflexive movie then, both in its use of the camera and its reference to musical convention. Bright, solid primary colors abound. The DVD looks lovely. I’d definitely like to watch it again soon.

Agnes Varda made a 60-minute film in 1992 called “The Young Girls Turns 25″, which of course would have made for a fantastic DVD extra, but of course is not included on the barebones U.S. release.

Jonathan Rosenbaum: “There are English-dubbed versions of both Umbrellas and Young Girls; I haven’t seen the latter, but the English version of Umbrellas is so unrelievedly awful that I’m happy to have missed the dubbed Young Girls.” Although if the IMDB trivia page is to be believed, “Rochefort” was fully shot in English as well as French, so it might be worth hunting down an English version if it still exists anywhere.

Caroline Layde for Senses of Cinema:
“However undemanding and lollipop Demy’s films may appear, they present some nuance and sophisticated intertext, and they share a certain charm, vivid and unified. His films inhabit worlds in themselves that may peripherally refer to social reality and the real world but remain content as alternate realities of poetry, color, and music.

“Demy’s consistency of vision itself justifies his inclusion among the “auteurs”, defined by André Bazin and François Truffaut and expanded by Andrew Sarris as distinguishing themselves with their salient visual language from mere metteurs-en-scène. Demy certainly created a signature style of poetry and innocence and clung to it. Yet this quality also has a sophisticated aspect, suggesting the dream worlds of the surrealists and of Demy’s inspiration, Jean Cocteau. It is fitting that the American critic Gary Carey has described Demy as “the Joseph Cornell of French cinema”.

The first time I was too blown away by how wonderful this movie is, so entranced by its beauty and mesmerized by the entirely-sung dialogue to quite believe what I was seeing and hearing. Knew I’d have to see it again soon to make sure the dream was true. Still a nearly perfect movie… even more so now that I understand the singing and the flow and the story, and can just get caught up in it. No need to recount the plot – I know it too well. One of my favorite movies ever, for sure now. Guess I’m ready to see The Young Girls of Rochefort.