Jacques Demy

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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.Read More »

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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. Read More »

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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!Read More »

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.Read More »

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.Read More »

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.Read More »