{"id":12678,"date":"2018-06-16T20:00:41","date_gmt":"2018-06-17T01:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=12678"},"modified":"2018-06-13T15:43:33","modified_gmt":"2018-06-13T20:43:33","slug":"a-room-in-town-1982-jacques-demy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/12678","title":{"rendered":"A Room in Town (1982, Jacques Demy)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Starts and ends with a labor strike, but I guess 1982 was too little\/late for Demy to be considered political enough to hang with the New Wave gang again. This is a tragedy version of The Young Girls of Rochefort<\/a><\/em>: all-singing, love and coincidence following multiple characters through 1955 Nantes, ending in suicide and disaster.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Our doomed lovers are Edith (Dominique Sanda, also suicidal in Bresson’s Une femme douce<\/em>) and Francois (Richard Berry, now a writer\/director). She’s dabbling in prostitution to get away from her loveless marriage, walking the streets in only a fur coat.<\/p>\n

Edith’s mom (Danielle Darrieux, the mom in Rochefort<\/em>) is Francois’s landlady, though they won’t discover this until late. Edith’s impotent husband is a redbearded Michel Piccoli. In 1967 Danielle Darrieux’s character was dating Piccoli, and now 15 years later he’s married to her daughter. Danielle is ex-aristocracy, politically opposed to her “anarchist” tenant, dealing with loneliness after the recent death of her husband and a seldom-visiting petulant daughter who claims to be in eternal love with the man she met the night before.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Francois is a junior dockworker, so is afraid of losing his job during the strike. His sweet, lovely girlfriend Violette (Fabienne Guyon, a singer and stage actress) is pregnant, has a sweet, lovely mother (Anna Gaylor), but Francois tells Violette about his love affair and breaks everyone’s hearts. He joins his balding coworker (Jean-Francois Stevenin who plays the balding dude in everything: Le Pont du Nord<\/a><\/em>, Small Change<\/a><\/em>, The Limits of Control<\/a><\/em>) on the front lines, and the movie ends how it must: Piccoli slashes his own throat, Francois gets his head smashed by the cops and Edith shoots herself.<\/p>\n

Francois and Stevenin, with union leader Jean-Louis Rolland in the hat:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

This was the last film from the box set, so I checked out the exhaustive A to Z<\/em> extra by James Quandt. “Given his happy childhood, one wonders what accounts for all the broken families in his films.” Demy considered Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne<\/a><\/em> “the formative influence of his career” and Quandt displays similarities between Bay of Angels<\/a><\/em> and Pickpocket<\/a><\/em>. “The director once said that his ideal would be to make fifty interlocking films elaborating on his characters’ overlapping destinies.” I knew about the Cocteau and Ophuls connections, but the segment on influences from paintings was fresh. Interesting sidenote on the axe murderer in Rochefort<\/em>, and Une Chambre en Ville<\/em> was said to be Demy’s dream project and he was crushed when it flopped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Starts and ends with a labor strike, but I guess 1982 was too little\/late for Demy to be considered political enough to hang with the New Wave gang again. This is a tragedy version of The Young Girls of Rochefort: all-singing, love and coincidence following multiple characters through 1955 Nantes, ending in suicide and disaster. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[357,166,450,175,80,191,251,461,607],"class_list":["post-12678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1980s","tag-jacques-demy","tag-labor-union","tag-michel-piccoli","tag-musical","tag-prostitution","tag-starts-at-the-end","tag-strike","tag-suicide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12678"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12687,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12678\/revisions\/12687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}