The ideal sequel and complement to our Max Ophüls retrospective last season, this survey of the films of French master Jacques Demy provides another instance of a major artist condescended to as a stylist, his borrowings from Hollywood, Ophüls, and Cocteau, propensity for artifice, and light-hearted, exuberant tone mistaken for triviality. Much the opposite is true; as our month-long series reveals, Demy’s vision was often political (even in fairy tales) and always profound, his natural inclination to delight simultaneous with a clear-eyed sense of life’s sadness. With a number of recently struck prints and several rarities, the retrospective offers the best opportunity to rediscover Demy’s cinema, equal parts enchantment and melancholy.
Our last, considerably smaller tribute to Jacques Demy was called “Cinema of Joy,” a title which only half captures the tone of his world view, the Demy of popular conception, a frivolous confectioner who created a colour-coordinated dreamland cobbled from musicals, fairy tales, and Hollywood classics. Like his hero Max Ophüls, to whom he dedicated his first feature, LOLA, Demy was too often treated as stylish and insubstantial, a director whose love of artifice and ornament resulted in an art of arabesque - operetta rather than verismo - though, despite their rank heterosexism, fellow nouvelle vague directors and critics at Cahiers du cinéma championed him as a serious artist.
As far from Ophüls’s fated Mitteleuropa as Demy’s delicate, autobiographical films are, they invoke Ophüls time and again, from the very name of LOLA’s eponym, to Madame Emery in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, pondering which of her belongings to sell, perhaps her jewels, recalling Madame de...’s similar act of reluctant divestment, to the Ophulsian tracking shot past four windows in MODEL SHOP, following Gary Lockwood through his beach house as if he were Joan Fontaine. Like Ophüls, Demy prized extravagant camera movement (cranes and tracks), employed motifs of circularity both within and between films, and focused on the illusory nature of love, ephemerality of happiness, and mortality - Demy’s is a most death-haunted cinema - to which he added his own romantic sense of loss and
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