Jacques Demy, Nantes (44)

For many, the film director Jacques Demy is a highly important figure in the history of Nantes, and certainly the Médiathèque is named after him. But unfortunately there remains very little of L'Allée des Tanneurs, and nothing of which I'm aware of 9 Allée des Tanneurs, where Demy's father had a garage, where his mother serviced the local women in hairdressing, and where Jacques spent his childhood and adolescence. Jacques's wife Agnès Varda brought much interest to this spot in her film Jacquot de Nantes.

Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy in La Guérinière, Noirmoutier, Vendée (85)

Film directors Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy bought a derelict windmill in La Guérinière, L'ile de Noirmoutier, which they to some extent restored and where they spent their summers and Christmasses, sometimes hounded by paparazzi because of such guests as Cathérine Deneuve and Michel Legrand. The setting, right in front of the beach, is idyllic. There are four defunct windmills shown here, of which the first is the one which belonged to Varda and Demy. Apart from the last windmill, all shots are taken from the beachside. (A sail on Varda and Demy's mill is broken because it was hit by lightning.)

Le Mur tombé du ciel #5: Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda and Anouk Aimée

Jacques Demy – a major film director and a major person born in Nantes – is sadly on the point of being almost forgotten in the city he loved so much: Varda's loving tribute to him in Jacqou de Nantes is an important film, as are the films which Demy set in Nantes – Une chambre en ville and Lola. But he's not forgotten in this mural, which shows him behind the movie camera, Varda behind him and Anouk Aimé (as Lola) in front. Some shots were taken in places which no longer exist, although others are set in the art nouveau splendour of La Cigale restaurant.

Jacques Demy's Une chambre en ville | A Room in Town (1982)

Set in 1955 in the middle of a strike in Nantes, Une chambre en ville is nevertheless not a political film. But it is entirely narrated in music, as of course were Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. The difference, though, is that whereas the two former movies were relatively light in tone (Les Parapluies perhaps particularly sentimental), this film is bleak.

François Guilbaud (Richard Berry) is a striking worker who has hired a room in the home of Mme Langlois (Danielle Darrieux), the widow of a colonel she loved, and who has been ruined by her wayward son. The room is in the centre of the town, in the Rue du Roi-Albert near the cathedral and the préfecture: the main battleground between police and strikers.

François's girlfriend is Violette (Fabienne Guyon), who has discovered that she's pregnant by him and wants to marry him. But then François meets Édith Leroyer (Dominique Sanda), who's unhappily married to the brutish and impotent Edmond (Michel Piccoli), and they are both madly in love at first sight: Violette and Edmond suddenly become so much psychic history. Plus, the sexually frustrated Édith is – would you believe it? – Mme Langlois's daughter.

But then the fight between cops and strikers is played out on the streets below Mme Langlois's window, François is wounded and taken into her place, and dies: unable to live without him, Édith shoots herself dead and lies down at François's side. That's no singing matter.

Jacques Demy's Lola (1961)

This dazzling black and white film – with pre-echoes of both Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) – is only superficially (or in jigsaw fashion) narrative and can hardly be approached in terms of conventional narrative because it's packed with so many chance encounters and coincidences which take the film to other spaces.

The events can, however, be summed up quite easily, even if such an approach misses out on the essence:

–– Lola (Anouk Aimée) works in a cabaret called 'El Dorado' (actually the art nouveau La Cigale restaurant in Nantes), and has a son by Michel (Jacques Harden), who returns rich after seven years in search of El Dorado in the Pacific, and the three get together in the end.

–– Marc (Richard Cassard) meets his old friend 'Lola' in a shopping centre (in fact in Le Passage Pommeraye, Nantes, where several scenes take place), falls in love with her, but her heart yearns for her first love Michel, meaning that Marc's first love ('Lola') stands no chance of reciprocation.

–– Frankie is an American sailor on leave again in Nantes, and like his shipmates frequents the cabaret. Lola has had a short sexual liaison with him because he looks like Michel, who was also a sailor.

–– Madame Desnoyer runs into Marc in a bookshop and he visits her several times. Towards the end she is forced to chase after her twelve-year-old daughter  who has run off to join her uncle.

Within these narratives are links to the same narratives, or links to other films by Demy, of which these are only a few:

–– Lola's real name is Cécile, like Mme Desnoyer's daughter: also, both Cécile and Mme Desnoyers (whose husband is dead) are single mothers.

–– Mme Desnoyers used to live in Cherbourg, where her daughter has left for, where Frankie's ship is due to leave for Chicago, and of course where Demy's later Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is set.

–– Frankie is the young Cécile's first love, a chaste one unlike the maturity of Frankie's relationship with the older Cécile.

–– 'Michel' is the older Cécile's lover's forename; the same name is Marc's surname.

Education is one of the film's themes, such as:

–– There is a dance teacher (played by Carlo Nell), and a dance school is visible in the background of the final scene to take place in Le Passage Pommeraye.

–– Frankie wants to be a teacher: he's learning French and the young Cécile is learning English. Marc gives the young Cécile a French-English dictionary.

–– In Les Demoiselles de Rochefort Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) teaches dance, whereas Françoise Dorléac gives singing lessons.

The characters weave in and out of different places in the centre of Nantes, often bumping into each other or passing one another in the street without knowing the links they have. In this way, the 'Demy-monde' shows the aleatory nature of existence. All the main characters leave Nantes in the end. Lola is Demy's first fim, and his first masterpiece.

Jacques Demy's Peau d’Âne | Donkey Skin (1965)

 

Jacques Demy's Peau d’Âne is a glorious, and very faithful in terms of the story, recreation of Charles Perrault's fairy story Peau d’Âne (1694), said to be the first French fairy story ever.

A king's wife dies, telling him (Jean Marais) that he must marry a woman more beautiful than her. In order for a male to follow, the king is under pressure, but can find no beautiful new queen: the only person is his daughter (Catherine Deneuve). The princess is horrified at the thought (of incest presumably) and seeks help from her fairy godmother (Delphine Seyrig), who comes up with several suberfuges to avoid the marraige and in the end finds one: the princess says she'll marry her father if he brings her the skin of the ass whose droppings are gems and gold coins that have been making the kingdom rich. Amazingly, the king agrees and lays the skin on her bed while she's sleeping.

The godmother then wakes the princess up, tells her to put on the ass's skin as a disguise, and to leave the castle using one of her magic wands. Incognito, the princess finds a tumbledown cabin in the woods in which to live and finds work as servant to a female witch who spits toads. Then the handsome prince of a neighbouring kingdom (Jacques Perrin), sexually frustrated because he can find no one to love, wanders in the wood and sees a rose (with the princess's lips) who tells him not to give up: he then sees the beautiful princess in her humble cabin dressed her finery and is smitten.

The prince learns that the girl's name is Peau d’Âne, and from then on takes to his bed, lovestruck. His parents are in despair until the prince asks for Peau d’Âne to bake him a cake, which she does, and includes her precious ring, which he nearly chokes on. After announcing that he will marry the woman the ring fits, this is an excuse for every quack and mountebank to sell love potions, but eventually – after every nubile woman has tried on the ill-fitting ring – along comes Peau d’Âne, a perfect fit, who then throws down her animal clothing to reveal a princess.

Whereupon, all the princes in the world converge on the realm, including the neighbouring king, who appears – several centuries out of time – in a helicopter with the princess's godmother, who is to be the king's new wife.

The bare bones of the story are perhaps a bit of a yawn, but on the other hand the sheer colour in the film is a feast: bright, garish, the contrasts between the red faces of the servants and the red horses in the princess's world and the blueness of the prince's world, for instance, are very notable. As of course is the music, which echoes that of the two previous films of Demy's in which Catherine Deneuve appeared in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. Several châteaux were used in the film: Chambord, Plessis-Bourré, Neuville (Yvelines), and Pierrefonds (Oise).

Apart from the obvious anachronism of the helicopter, there are several quotations from times after Perrault, an influence by Cocteau, a reference of course to the flower power of the sixties, the prince's desire to be free from parental restrictions, etc. Even the cake itself which the prince eats is a reference to the 'space cake' (laced with cannabis) that Demy and Varda took: for the end of the seventeenth century, this is a very hippie film.

Jacques Demy's Les Demoiselles de Rochefort | The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

I normally hate musicals and have always thought they're for people with low attention spans: thin piece of narrative, then largely irrelevant crappy song, repeat to the end. OK I'm very late watching one of Jacques Demy's films, but I can see a distinct difference from the norm. I've yet to see Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), where the songs are the entire narrative, but I've just seen Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, which is roughly half spoken, half sung, and here too the singing is an integral part of the narrative: you're forced to follow the words carefully. This is Demy's paeon to the American musical, and between the lines you are reminded of Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin arriving in New York as sailors and singing of the city's glories in Stanley Donen's On the Town (1949), and more particularly of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell singing 'Two Little Girls from Little Rock' in Howard Hawk's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1954) when Catherine Deneuve (as Delphine Garnier) and her (also real) sister Françoise Dorléac (as Solange), also both in glittery red dresses, get up on stage in Place Colbert, Rochefort and start singing and dancing away. And yet at the same time it could be an update of a lost Shakespearean comedy.

In fact a 53-year-old Gene Kelly himself (as Andy Miller) is in this film, along with other American performers such as George Chakiris and Grover Dale (as Étienne and Bill, members of a travelling troupe). There was an American and a French version of this film and the singing is dubbed by everyone apart from Danielle Darrieux (who is the café-owning mother of the sisters: Yvonne Garnier).

This is a sumptuous feast of a film, enthusiastically performed amidst bright pastel, campy colours. But there are unfulfilled wishes here, people initially dodging inadvertently out of the way of the love of their life, and there is an odd minor sub-plot about former café frequenter Subtil Dutrouz (Henri Crémieux) killing and cutting up the woman who's been rejecting him for decades. Delphine and Solange believe they'll find the love of their life in Paris and long to live there, and Yvonne tortures herself over the man – Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli) – she left for a Mexican several years previously, simply because she couldn't stand thought of being called 'Madame Dame'. Unbeknown to all three women, the love of their live is actually in Rochefort: Simon has a music shop in the town, Delphine is the ideal woman for sailor/artistic painter Maxence (Jacques Perrin), and Andy longs for the much younger Solange, whose piece of music of hers he has when she accidently dropped it: she too yearns for him. Of course, in the end they all come together, although Demy originally had planned death for Maxence as he hitched his way out of Rochefort.

This is a hugely successful masterpiece, worthy of viewing multiple times.

Agnès Varda's Les Plages d'Agnès | The Beaches of Agnès (2008)

Les Plages d'Agnès (which inevitably translates terribly in English) is Varda's autobiography, but of course a very quirky one: imagine any other film director setting up mirrors and old family photos on the sand. As is to be expected, there are similarities between this film and Jacquot de Nantes, Varda's tribute to her husband Jacques Demy.

At the beginning of Les Plages Varda says that if she were split down the middle there would be a beach, that the North Sea and sand were a beginning for her. She starts with a beach in Belgium, and states that her childhood in Belgium is lovingly remembered by the beaches she went to in that country during her early holidays: Knokke-Le-Zoute (which reminds me of Brel's song), Blankenberg, Ostende, Mariakerke, Middelkerke, La Panne and Zeebrugge.

Varda's family fled from Belgium to Sète – a town usually evoking Paul Valéry and Georges Brassens who were born and buried there – which holds particularly important memories for her. It was there too that she directed her first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), which is an experimental film inspired by William Faulkner's The Wild Palms (1939). This book today is usually called If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, which consists of two interwoven short stories: 'The Wild Palms' and 'Old Man'.¹

Other beaches included in the film are in the peninsula of Noirmoutier, where Jacques Demy had much earlier spent his holidays, and where the couple bought a former windmill overlooking the beach at La Guérinière.

Venice Beach also features within the context of the hippie period of free love and the Black Panthers, etc.

As opposed to what the title might suggest, Les Plages d'Agnès isn't just about beaches, but is a kind of collage with reconstructions of Varda's memories – old photos, clips from films, modern filming of places mentioned, reflections on the past, etc. A delight.

¹ La Pointe Courte was a small fishing village now incorporated into Sète itself.
²  Varda's forename was 'Arlette' because she was conceived in Arles, although she changed this name officially to Agnès.