Demy’s films are mostly romantic, lyrical and fairy-like but he does not neglect psychological realism



Young Jacques Demy started his career in the early 1960s at the time when French film scene was shaken by the New Wave movement with his debut feature film Lola (1961), starring the already famous Anouk Aimee as a cabaret entertainer. Film professionals were convinced that Demy would become another talented author (such as Godard, Resnais, Rhomer, Rivette,Truffaut, Chabrol...) who would change and liberate the expressive potentials of film art. In Lola, relying on the sophistication of Max Ophuls’ opus, Demy managed to detect inner moods of his heroine whose life seems to be determined by coincidences. Such approach was in line with poetics of fragmentation characteristic for modernist tendencies of French cinema.


Inspired by his talented colleagues who in their film made tribute to classic Hollywood (especially genres), Demy turned to one genre that was especially popular on the other side of the Atlantic - musicals. His classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1963) immediately won the Grand Prix in Cannes. Of course his work, characterized by typical French refinement, poetics and romantic sensibility, is very different from American (often playful and full of songs) understanding of this popular genre. Such structure of his film is primarily based on exceptional expressiveness of the young, fragile and above all “filmogenic” actress Catherine Deneuve, impressive and easily remembered music by Michele Legrand and skillful adjustment of color to the character of the melodramatic story about a young couple in love and their painful farewell when the young man has to go to war in Algeria.


After the praised and popular The Umbrellas of Cherbourg critics’ expectations might have been too high and so they thought Demy’s next film, The Young Girls of Rochefort that he co-directed with his wife Agnes Varda, was much weaker than his earlier films. The story takes place in a music and dance school and features two sisters, both on the screen and in real life: Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorléac. (By the way, at the occasion of the extremely talented Dorleac’s premature death, Francois Truffaut wrote an inspired and warm necrology under the title “Her name was Francoise…”).


Due to the lack of interest of our film distribution companies for the director’s work, it was hard to see any of Demy’s later films in our country. Therefore we had to rely on foreign critics’ judgment that Demy failed their expectations; this especially applies to the films he made in his American phase.


Here are a few general critiques of Demy’s opus: Demy’s directing characteristics, already visible in Lola, remain easily recognizable in his later films: stylized, peculiar photography and romantic atmosphere; it is apparent that (besides dominant poetics in his approach) his author handwriting characterizes and precisely profiles his characters; Demy’s films are mostly romantic, lyrical and fairy-like but he does not neglect psychological realism.


In this program we will see six of his films. If we approach them without prejudice, we may wish to see all of Demy’s films in Tuškanac some day! (Petar Krelja)