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Sep 19, 2014 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

Until now, Jacques Demy was perhaps the classic filmmaker most in need of a lavish, high-definition treatment. The French auteur — best known for his whimsical musicals and almost obscenely-bright color palettes — received this beautiful, extras-packed box set from Criterion, with each film restored to an almost-pristine condition by the filmmaker’s surviving family members. The Essential Jacque Demy includes these six features, which are best viewed in chronological progression, like so:

Lola – Demy’s reserved debut feature feels quaint in comparison to the rest of the films found here, but a few of the director’s trademarks were visible from the get-go. Two lovelorn men circle a beautiful cabaret singer—the titular Lola (Anouk Aimée)—and vie for her affection; all the while she pines for her long-absent, fortune-seeking boyfriend (also the father of her little boy.) The characters’ stories cross over in clever ways, and with multiple dancing scenes and a charming song number that foreshadows the filmmaker’s later work. The most impressive aspect of this film, however, may be that it exists in this condition at all; the original negatives for Lola were destroyed long ago in a fire, and the remaining prints were worn-out to the point they were almost unwatchable. The movie underwent a lengthy and advanced restoration process, which is well-chronicled in the disc’s extra features; the before and after comparisons are like night and day. (The included restoration documentary is one of the few of its type worth watching.)

Bay of Angels – Demy’s second feature is surprisingly realistic in contrast with the overt stylization in his later films, but it’s one of the director’s most emotionally resonant works. Shot in black and white (like Lola) against a backdrop of France’s lavish, coastal casinos, the film stars Jeanne Moreau as a gorgeous gambling addict, and Claude Mann as a clean-cut young man who falls under her hypnotic spell. As you can imagine, he gets roped into her life of risks, and their story takes several heartbreaking turns.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – The de facto centerpiece of this box set and easily Demy’s best-known film, Umbrellas was a movie in dire need of a high definition makeover; it packs as much color into every shot as your average Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper. The colors pop amazingly in this HD transfer, and Cherbourg’s star, Catherine Deneuve, is equally vibrant (read: yowza!) The movie’s famous gimmick—it’s a musical where every single line is sung—will either go down like sugar or feel sickeningly sweet, depending on the type of viewer. Admittedly, it took some getting used to, but the characters are so charming, and the plot—about lovers separated when the young man is shipped off to battle—is so straight-forward that the sung dialogue stopped odd by a few scenes in.

The Young Girls of Rochefort – If Umbrellas’ sung dialogue felt too strange or off-putting, The Young Girls of Rochefort should be a serviceable middle ground. It’s a musical in the most traditional sense, where the characters break into song (and pretty often, dance) separately from their spoken dialogue. Catherine Deneuve stars again, this time with her sister Francoise Dorleac. They play siblings, bored with their lives in the modest, port village of Rochefort. A fair comes to town, and they befriend a pair of carnival workers who are putting together a show. Over the course of a weekend, the girls meet and fall for their ideal men; but, their romances don’t necessarily play out according to plan. The Young Girls of Rochefort is fun and romantic, with a few great pop numbers, and is no less colorful than the ultra-bright Umbrellas of Cherbourg; there’s a performance near the film’s end that may be, well, the pink-est scene in all of cinema.

Donkey Skin – A surprising, fantasy-based departure from Demy’s small coastal towns. Adapted from a French fairy tale, Catherine Deneuve this time plays a princess who flees to hide among peasants when her father, the ruler of a kingdom where most everything (and everyone) is blue, proposes to marry her after the death of her mother. She’s spotted in the forest by a prince from the nearby red kingdom, who becomes absolutely smitten by the mysterious girl. Donkey Skin is a musical—though, to a lesser degree than Rochefort and (of course) Umbrellas—and far and away embraces the surrealist elements of Demy’s style to the highest degree. (Think: backwards footage, or a helicopter showing up at a 17^th Century wedding.) This isn’t the strongest film in the boxed set, but it’s certainly enjoyable for its bizarre imagery alone.

Une Chambre En Ville – The set’s final film, shot 12 years after 1970’s Donkey Skin. Demy falls back on the same gimmick he used in his beloved Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in that every line in the film is once again sung. Unlike Umbrellas, Demy’s colors are much more realistic; almost jarringly so, compared to the previous films in this set. Yellows, pinks, and reds are replaced with drab grays and brown, perhaps to make the color palette more appropriate for the film’s pretty serious subject matter: protesting, prostitution, impotence, unplanned pregnancy, murder, and suicide. This all comes together in a way that never really seems to work, but it’s interesting nonetheless to close out the set with the filmmaker’s last big work, especially when it’s so easy to trace it back to his earlier musicals and see how his approach developed over the decades.

As far as extras go, the list of special features included in this box is (of course) nothing less than gargantuan. The clear highlights are a collection of four short films shot by Demy between 1951 and 1962, which allow the viewer to pick out little elements of the director’s style in their practically fetal stage. The feature-length documentary, The World of Jacques Demy, was put together by Demy’s wife, Agnes Varda, in the 1990s, and is a fascinating career retrospective. One more bonus feature worth drawing extra attention to is the lengthy visual essay Jacques Demy, A to Z, compiled and narrated by critic James Quandt. You could hardly ask for a better concentrated summarization of Demy’s life and work, as Quandt lovingly breaks down the filmmaker’s influences in alphabetical fashion. It does make reference to films not included in Criterion’s box set, which will likely lead interested viewers to search for other ways of seeing them; with so much of his work still lacking proper, in-print North American releases, we’ll count our blessings that we’ve gotten such nice editions of the films we see here.

www.criterion.com/boxsets/1055-the-essential-jacques-demy

Author rating: 8/10