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Jacques Demy: Young Girls
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Jacques Demy's ``The Young Girls of Rochefort'' is undoubtedly too much. Here is romantic intrigue served up with a knowing lack of shame, a musical boasting star power of the highest magnitude that satirizes the conventions of the movie musical with affection and wicked glee.
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Demy's only American film ambitiously addresses the anxieties of American youth at the end of the '60s. Gary Lockwood stars as George, a confused young man who's just quit his job and knows that he'll inevitably be drafted. He falls for a mysterious French model named Lola (Anouk Aimée, reprising her role from Demy's first film). Aimée's performance is perhaps even richer here than in Lola, but the true star is the city of Los Angeles. Demy superbly captures the grittiness and poetry of the city, which led the film to be a perfect subject for Thom Anderson's essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself. 35mm.
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On one level Demy uses rhythm to achieve a naturalistic effect, as the movement of his camera seeks to capture the pulse of a situation. In one scene Demy brings this strategy to full, almost surreal, bloom: the frenetic bumper car and whirligig scenes with Frankie and Cécile, filmed at an actual biannual fair on the Cours Saint Pierre in Nantes (DVD chapter 18, "At the Carnvial"). There he contrasts Cécile's budding attraction for the young sailor with swirling shots combining a vérité feel with expressionistic compositions, all edited to intensify the manic glee – and sexual undercurrents. Further, Demy counterpoints that emotional and visual energy with the coolly-impassioned cascades of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, whose single instrument (harpsichord) ... contrasts with the scene's visual, and emotional, density. (To see how Demy uses his mastery of rhythm in a very different context, look at the spellbinding first casino scene in
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[S]o Demy dedicates Lola to him, as well as paying tribute to another famous Lola, Marlene Dietrich's Lola Lola from The Blue Angel (1930). Demy's Lola (Anouk Aim$#233;e), a Nantes dancehall girl who looks like Jacqueline Kennedy and acts like Marilyn Monroe, is still a manslayer, but a far less dangerous creature than Dietrich.
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Although Varda offers many insights into all phases of Demy's life and career, she employs a non-chronological approach. The documentary is framed by the heartfelt letter of a young woman who was profoundly influenced by Demy's films, but who never had the opportunity to meet him in person. Varda then proceeds to an in-depth look at
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