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Jacques Demy: Love
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As individual as Godard or Rohmer, Jacques Demy was one of the most distinctive filmmakers to emerge from the French New Wave in the late 50s and early 60s. Indeed, the films he made up until his untimely death in 1990 constitute one of the most extraordinary bodies of work of that era. If only for his most famous and best-loved movie – The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Monorail’s screening at GFT in December – chosen and introduced by Duglas T. Stewart from the BMX Bandits), with its dialogue set to music and sung from bauble-bright start to bittersweet end – Demy would deserve a prominent place in the film history books. Geoff Andrew, BFI Southbank
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One of the giants of French postwar cinema, Jacques Demy (1931-1990) is best known for his fantastically exuberant THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG. Though he shared aesthetic connections with the New Wave-location shooting, kinetic mise-en-sè and love of American movies-Demy is clearly the architect of a singular universe.
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Somehow, Demy seems to have constructed the entire film out of these youthful emotions. It is conceived as a sort of teen pop opera, and all of the dialogue is sung, not spoken, elevating the courtship to the realm of the poetic. In essence they live not in the real world, but in the world of the lavish Hollywood musicals Demy loved. And within this context, it seems perfectly natural for the characters to sing out their feelings. Function and form are perfectly matched. The images here are so dazzlingly clear and crisp that they seem to jump off the screen.
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"Seemingly banal and sentimental on the surface, Demy has avoided these aspects by tasteful handling and the right balance of emotion, compassion and narrative. Pic becomes touching without being mawkish, simple sans being trite, and lovely to look at.
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It wasn't until the mid-Nineties, when a restored version of his 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg returned to dazzle anew, that contemporary viewers started to see Demy as something more than a dabbler in moribund genres. Now, Demy's first two films--Lola (1961) and Bay of Angels (1963)--have been restored as well, by his widow, the filmmaker Agnès Varda. (They're screening for a week on a double bill at Oak Street Cinema.) Encountering them in this form is like running into a childhood love after 40 years, and finding her youth undimmed by a second.
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