Quote:
Bay of the Angels (La Baie des anges) stars Jeanne Moreau as a middle-aged Parisian gambling addict who leaves her husband and children and heads for the roulette tables of Nice. There she meets young and handsome Claude Mann–a meeting which coincides with Moreau’s first winning streak. She latches onto Mann in the belief that he’s a good luck charm, and remains with him even when she starts losing heavily. Mann, emotionally drained, walks out of the relationship. The film ends with Mann entreating Moreau to return with him to the bourgeois existence that she’d escaped in the first scene. Bay of the Angels was directed by Jacques Demy, just before he achieved international fame with his musical films Young Girls of Rochefort and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Jacques Demy - (1963) Bay of Angels.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 24mn
Size: 	1.41 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	960x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.667
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 199 Kbps
BPP: 	0.166
Audio
#1:  	French 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/C27BD308B53B2FB/Jacques_Demy_-_(1963)_Bay_of_Angels.mkv

https://rapidgator.net/file/8638226177d793094c65a3c461a42157/Jacques_Demy_-_(1963)_Bay_of_Angels.mkvv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Jacques Demy – La baie des anges AKA The Bay of Angels (1963) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Jacques Demy was arguably the greatest romantic of the French New Wave, and Lola was one film in which he proved how vital both sides of that equation were to his vision. While Lola exists within the same workaday France of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut’s early films, Raoul Coutard’s cinematography allows Demy to find a beauty and poetry in the most ordinary circumstances; Coutard’s moving camera brings the grace of a dancer to the film’s visual proceedings, no matter how shabby some of the characters’ circumstances may be. The narrative is so fluffy it threatens to blow away at any moment, but Demy primarily uses it as a device to focus on the emotional lives of his characters, and it is their common search for love that moves the story and keeps the film compelling. Demy’s casting is nothing short of superb: Anouk Aimée is joyously radiant in the title role, and her every word and movement convey such a seductive charm that it’s no wonder three men are vying for her hand; Marc Michel, Alan Scott, and Jacques Harden all resister in their own way as Lola’s suitors; and Annie Duperoux is spot-on as Lola’s teenage counterpart. Lola is a film whose goal is obviously to touch the heart rather than the mind, but Demy tells his simple story with such a rare blend of passion and intelligence that he’s able to please the intellect as well. The result remains one of the most purely pleasurable products of the French Nouvelle Vague.

Jacques Demy - (1961) Lola.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 28mn
Size: 	1.39 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x436 
Aspect ratio:  	2.35:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 049 Kbps
BPP: 	0.191
Audio
#1:  	French 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/51E6A86198E0E20/Jacques_Demy_-_(1961)_Lola.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:English

The post Jacques Demy – Lola (1961) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Donkey Skin takes its story from the fairy tale of the same name, as told by 17th-century French writer Charles Perrault. A variant of Cinderella, the tale begins with a king (Jean Marais), who is well-loved and very happy, as he has a beautiful wife (Catherine Deneuve) and a beautiful daughter (Deneuve again), not to mention a literal moneymaker in a donkey that doesn’t excrete the usual fertilizer, but instead gold and jewels. The king’s fortunes take a turn for the worse when he loses his wife to a sudden illness. Before she dies, he makes the unwise promise to only marry a woman more beautiful than she. When the king’s ministers force him to undertake another marriage to produce a male heir, the only woman who surpasses the dead queen in beauty is…his daughter. Being that this is a fairy tale, things work a bit differently, and the usual opposition to incest is brushed over fairly easily. The most amusing bit comes when the king asks his wise man whether the marriage would be wrong, and the wise man responds that all little girls want to marry their father, and that if the wise man had a daughter, he’d want to marry her. So there!

Daughter (she has no given name in the film) isn’t totally sure, though. She runs off to visit her godmother, the Lilac Fairy (Delphine Seyrig), who informs her that under no circumstances should she marry her father. She tells the daughter to stall him by asking for a series of increasingly elaborate dresses (the colors of weather, the moon, and then the sun), which he delivers accordingly. Finally, they must play their final card: the daughter asks for the skin of the prize donkey. “My banker?” exclaims the king. But he consents, and following this ultimate show of love, the Lilac Fairy tells daughter to flee, wearing the donkey skin as a disguise.

Jacques Demy - (1970) Donkey Skin.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 30mn
Size: 	1.52 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	960x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.667
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 149 Kbps
BPP: 	0.162
Audio
#1:  	French 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/1E8EDB96E8656BC/Jacques_Demy_-_(1970)_Donkey_Skin.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Jacques Demy – Peau d’âne AKA Donkey Skin (1970) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Greed, corruption, ignorance, stupidity, and disease. Midsummer, 1349: the Black Death reaches northern Germany. A family of strolling players travel to Hamelin for the Mayor’s daughter’s wedding to the Baron’s son. He wants her dowry to pay his army, while his father taxes the people to build a cathedral he thinks will save his soul. A local Jewish apothecary tries to find a treatment for the plague. The Priests charge him with heresy and witchcraft. A mysterious minstrel (Donovan), who joined up with the players and who has soothed the Mayor’s daughter with his music, promises to rid the town of rats for a fee. The Mayor agrees, then reneges after the rats have been dealt with. In the morning, the plague, the Jew’s execution, and the Piper’s revenge come at once.

2.26GB | 1 h 30 min | 1022×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/27C335A829DBD9E/The.Pied.Piper.1972.BluRay.576p.AC3.2.0.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English (Muxed)

The post Jacques Demy – The Pied Piper (1972) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
A male Parisian driving school owner who goes to see his doctor and complains of feeling run down is pronounced four months pregnant. When the diagnosis is confirmed by a specialist, the result is an international media frenzy.

Review:
When The Pied Piper proved to be a commercial failure (no wonder considering how many kids it must have traumatized), Demy returned to France again for one of his lightest and most commercial films, the fluffy comedy A Slightly Pregnant Man (released in France under the far more cumbersome title of L’Événement le plus important depuis que l’homme a marché sur la lune, or “The Most Important Event Since Man Walked on the Moon”). Beauty salon worker Irene (Deneuve) is more than a little confused when her driver’s ed teacher fiance, Marco (Mastroianni, her real-life beau at the time), is told by his physician that he’s actually four months pregnant. Paris is thrown into an uproar and the scientific community is flipped upside down as Marco contends with his growing celebrity.

Extremely light on plot, this was the first of the odd pregnant man subgenre (followed by uneven efforts like Rabbit Test and Junior) and, like those followers, can’t quite come up with a satisfactory solution to its provocative story hook; however, Demy manages to casually bat around issues of religion, abortion, feminism, and sexual orientation with ease, and even some musical content slips through with Mirielle Mathieu belting out the catchy theme song a couple of times. Of course, the usual eye-popping colors and wild production design choices (check out that big gold thumb!) are still present throughout.

1.41GB | 1h 35mn | 960×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/4DBED51C2971A6F/A_Slightly_Pregnant_Man_(1973)_–_Jacques_Demy.mkv
https://nitroflare.com/view/E5D14C9DDF1DFD9/A_Slightly_Pregnant_Man_(1973)_–_Jacques_Demy_revised.srt

Language:French
Subtitles:English

The post Jacques Demy – L’Événement le plus important depuis que l’homme a marché sur la lune AKA A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

While trying to raise money to prevent his car from being repossessed, George is attracted to Lola, a Frenchwoman who works in a “model shop” (an establishment which rents out beautiful pin-up models to photographers). George spends his last twelve dollars to photograph her, and discovers that she is as unhappy as he.

Quote:
Los Angeles has served as the backdrop for countless Hollywood movies but in Jacques Demy’s The Model Shop (1969), the French director’s first and only American film, the city becomes the real protagonist, with its sprawling urban landscape, oil derricks, desolate beaches and constant traffic providing a vivid canvas for a contemporary love story about romantic longing and unrealized dreams. Film writer Clare Stewart referred to the film in the quarterly film journal Senses of Cinema as “a road movie that doesn’t go anywhere” and that’s not a putdown, but an apt description of what Demy was trying to create here – a drifting, dreamy mood piece.

…

On both a visual and conceptual level, The Model Shop is spellbinding, presenting Los Angeles as a cityscape of neon signs, billboards, Standard Oil gas stations, parking lots and people constantly in motion, driving to and fro in cars, chasing unobtainable dreams in the film capitol of the world, a place where cinematic dreams are the main export. Cinematographer Michel Hugo applies a palette of pastel colors to Los Angeles that brings a dreamlike gloss to even the pollution, industrial plants and urban sprawl of the city. The sound design of the film is equally evocative, blending the ambient hum of traffic with an eclectic mixture of music being broadcast from George’s car radio (Bach, Rimski-Korsakov, Spirit, Robert Schumann).

The Model Shop is much less successful in building dramatic interest in the free-form narrative and what happens to both George and Lola due to uneven performances and awkward dialogue. Gary Lockwood, 32 years old at the time of the film, seems miscast as a disenchanted 26-year-old who is too impatient and unwilling to follow the traditional career path for architects. His scenes with Alexandra Hay, playing his girlfriend Gloria, are so strained and unnatural that you can never really fully accept them as a couple who were once in love or even enjoyed a mutual sexual attraction. Maybe that’s the point. Perhaps their lack of on-screen chemistry together is meant to emphasize the fact that they’ve become complete strangers but on a dramatic level, their scenes are inert. Even more ineffective are Lockwood’s interaction with his friend, band musician Jay Ferguson of Spirit (playing himself and not doing a very convincing job) and his occasional philosophical musings, such as his realization that he could die if he’s drafted: “I guess I never really thought about it before. Death, you know – it’s insane!” Even Anouk Aimee, who retains her elegance and an air of mystery throughout, is saddled with some pretentious dialogue and, in one scene, where she is reciting her long, personal history to George, interrupts herself by asking him, “Do I bore you?”, as if signaling the viewer to overlook the exposition in favor of the real story, which Demy has visualized perfectly.

2.71GB | 1h 37m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6CECC02BB3265C7/Model.Shop.1969.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Jacques Demy – Model Shop (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.