Biography: life and films
Demy's films are fantasies, alluring dream experiences that take drab reality and refashion it into a vibrant fairytale. But these are not the kind of fairytales where everyone goes off and lives happily ever after. Through the mirage of sugary artifice and whimsy we can easily make out the truth that lies beneath, the sorrow and decay from which we can never escape. Demy's films conjure up the image of a small child holding up its hands in front of its face, to avoid having to look at something too dreadful. We are that child, and when we dare to prise our fingers apart and peer through the tiny gap, as we are forced to do in those final devastating moments of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, we see what Demy wants us to see - that unless we face reality and give in to the ecstasy of loss our lives are worthless. How apt are those words at the end of Lola: "Pleure qui peut, rit qui veut." Demy will allow us to laugh, but he would rather we wept.
Jacques Demy was born on 5th June 1931 at Pontchâteau, a commune in the Loire-Atlantique department on the west coast of France. His father owned a garage and his mother worked as a hairdresser. He had a younger brother Yvon and sister Hélène. In the summer months, the family would rent a house in a little village near to Nantes, a town that Demy would form a close attachment to. From an early age, Jacques shared his parents' passion for cinema and popular opera. One of his favourite haunts was a marionette theatre in Nantes, and, at the age of four, he created his own puppet theatre. When he was nine, he made his first animated film, by handpainting strips of film. He bought his first film camera when he was 13 and spent most of his leisure time churning out animated films for his own amusement. By his 14th birthday, he was a fully-fledged cinéphile and a frequent attendee of a ciné-club in Nantes.
The bombing of Nantes by the Allies in 1943 and 1944 would leave a lasting impression on the young Jacques Demy. He sought refuge in the world of his imagination, his way of coping with the traumas and tragedies of real life. Demy's childhood fantasies contain the seeds of his future great films, which are all attempts to distance the spectator from the painful realities of existence. Not long before he was due to leave school, Demy had a chance meeting with the film director Christian-Jaque. The latter was so impressed by the aspiring young filmmaker that he sponsored his entry into the film school ETPC (École technique de photographie et de cinématographie) in Paris. At the end of his two-year course, Demy made a remarkable short film entitled Les Horizons morts.
Having completed his military service, Jacques Demy had settled on a career in cinema animation and lent his talents to the great French animator Paul Grimault, for whom he made some publicity films. In 1953, Demy became more interested in documentary filmmaking and contacted the documentarist Georges Rouquier, who employed him as an assistant on a few of his films. It was Rouquier who supported Demy's first commercial film, Le Sabotier du Val de Loire (1955), a documentary short about the dying rural craft of clog-making which won Demy an Honourable Mention at the 1956 Berlin International Film Festival and his first taste of critical acclaim.
It was whilst he was working on Rouquier's next film, S.O.S. Noronha, that Demy met the actor Jean Maris and, through him, the poet and playwright Jean Cocteau. The latter was so taken with Demy that he gave him the rights to adapt his short play Le Bel Indifférent. This short film, Demy's first fictional work, was followed by three more notable shorts: Le Musée Grévin (1958), a fantasy in which statues in the famous museum come to life and are pursued across Paris by their creators; La Mère et l'enfant (1959), a commission from the Ministry of Health instructing mothers on the education of their children up until the age of two; and Ars (1959), a film about the life of Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, a Catholic priest in the small French town of Ars. For this latter film, Demy was inspired by Robert Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951) - Bresson was a director he almost idolised. Demy then worked as an assistant on Le Voyage en ballon (1960), Albert Lamorisse's follow-up feature to his popular short film Le Ballon rouge (1956).
It was not until he was in his late twenties that Jacques Demy made his feature debut, with Lola (1960), a tribute to another of his film heroes, Max Ophüls which coincided with the emergence of the French New Wave. Initially titled Un billet pour Johannesburg, the film was financed by Georges de Beauregard, who had previously backed Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (1960). Initially, Demy had envisaged an extravagant homage to the classic American musical. It was to be filmed in glorious widescreen colour, with sumptuous sets, an even more sumptuous cast, and enough song-and-dance numbers to make Stanley Donen blush with envy. Beauregard was only prepared to stump up a minute fraction of the budget that Demy needed to realise this grand design, and so the film was shot in black-and-white, with a minuscule film crew, no lights, and just a few (modest) musical numbers.
Despite the drastic reining in of his ambitions, Demy delivers a film of extraordinary visual and emotional power, giving Anouk Aimée her first important screen role as the seductive Lola and starting his long-term association with another legend of French cinema, the composer Michel Legrand. Lola was a major critical success for a first-time director - Jean-Luc Godard even included it in his Top Ten films of 1961. In years to come, Godard would condemn Demy for the artificiality of his films and their lack of political content, dismissing his films as naïve and irrelevant. After the success of Lola, Jacques Demy was invited to contribute a sketch to the anthology film Les Sept Péchés capitaux (1961). Of the seven deadly sins, the one that Demy chose was Lust (Luxure). This gave Demy the opportunity to work with Jean-Louis Trintignant, the actor he had originally wanted for the lead male role in Lola.
In 1962, Demy married Agnès Varda, whom he had met four few years previously at a festival of short films in Tours. Their son, Mathieu Demy, was born in 1973 - he would become a successful film actor and would later turn his hand to directing, making his feature debut in 2011 with Americano. Varda also had a daughter Rosalie (from a previous relationship), whom Demy chose to adopt - she would also work in the film industry, as a costume designer. Agnès Varda was the most prominent woman director at the time of the French New Wave. She would make three films to commemorate her husband's life and work after his death in 1990: Jacquot de Nantes (1991), Les Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans (1993) and L'Univers de Jacques Demy (1995).
For his second film, Demy was determined to make a full-blown, all-singing, all-dancing musical, in the true Hollywood tradition. However, unable to raise the funding for what would become Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, he was compelled to make a more modest film, a film about decadence and desire in the sunny French town of Nice. Demy's one consolation was that he could work with Jeanne Moreau (and make her a peroxide blonde), not long after she had found international fame through François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962). Like Lola, La Baie des anges (1963) was shot in sumptuous black-and-white in a pristine coastal setting, and has a similar dreamlike quality, albeit with a more sombre and ironic edge. The film's dual aspect, a melancholic yearning barely glimpsed beneath a surface that glistens with sunny optimism, is typical of Demy's oeuvre.
If producer Georges de Beauregard had had his way, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg would have been made on a shoestring budget, in black-and-white, and without any musical numbers. Fortunately, Demy was so wedded to his dream project that he decided to look elsewhere for financial support. He finally found it, in the form of independent French producer Mag Bodard and 20th Century Fox, who were willing to stump up the one million francs that Demy needed to earn his place in film legend. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) was to be Demy's most commercially successful film, and also one of his biggest critical successes (although some critics regarded it as massively inferior to Lola). The film won two of France's most prestigious film awards: the Prix Louis Delluc and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. This was the film that made Catherine Denueve an international film star at the age of 20, and was nominated for four Oscars, including one for its most famous number, the love song I Will Wait for You, which became one of the best-known songs of the decade. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is among the greatest of all French love films, indubitably the most effective tear-jerker, and one of cinema's most perfect evocations of lost love and shattered illusions.
The success of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg went to Jacques Demy's head somewhat and he resolved to make an even more spectacular musical, of the kind that could only have come out of one of the richer Hollywood studios. In spite of the popularity of his first musical, Demy found it difficult to raise the six million francs he needed for Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), but he finally succeeded with the support of Warner-7 Arts. For the film to be marketable in the United States, Demy was obliged to hire some big name American actor-dancers, and he ended up with two of the best - song-and-dance legend Gene Kelly and George Chakiris, one of the stars of West Side Story (1961). The French side of the cast is no less impressive. Catherine Deneuve is partnered with her real-life sister Francoise Dorléac (in what would be her penultimate film before her tragic death in a car accident), with Danielle Darrieux playing their lovelorn mother. The character portrayed by Jacques Perrin is a familiar Demy archetype, someone who is on a quest for a perfect, yet hopelessly unattainable love. Many of the film's songs became hit records, particularly its most famous number: Nous sommes deux soeurs jumelles. Rochefort is a far more cheerful film than Cherbourg. The colours are more vibrant, the musical numbers far more upbeat, and the whole film positively roars with life and activity. And yet, beneath the surface glitz and easy smiles, we can still feel the wistful sense of longing for something that cannot be. The fairytale illusion doesn't completely deceive us.
Les Demoiselles de Rochefort was to be a turning point in Demy's career. After this success, his subsequent films were somewhat less well-regarded, and most were outright flops. Demy's determination to persevere with his artistic vision, heedless of the adverse critical reaction and losses he was stacking up, is one of the things that mark him out as an auteur. Compromise was not in his nature. Model Shop (1969), Demy's first English language film, was his sequel to his first film Lola, with Anouk Aimée reprising the role that had made her famous. Set in Los Angeles and paid for by Columbia Pictures, it was a fraught production right from the off, and Demy was not able to exercise the level of artistic control he had enjoyed on his previous films. One example of this is the choice of actor for the male lead. Demy was keen to hire a virtual unknown named Harrison Ford (the two even went on a reccee together, photographing the interior of a real sex shop in preparation for the film), but the studio thought otherwise and Ford was dropped in favour of Gary Lockwood - allegedly because the head of Columbia thought that Ford had no future as an actor. Whilst the film has its strengths and is one of the few American films of this time to directly refer to the Vietnam War, it does feel out of place in Demy's oeuvre. Far from being a success, Model Shop proved to be a Model Flop.
After this unsatisfying brush with reality, Demy plunged himself back into the world of make-believe, into a colourful child's fairytale with all the familiar trappings: castles, kings, princesses, fairies - and incest. Peau d'Âne (1970), Demy's homage to Jean Cocteau, is the director's most fanciful and fantastic film, one that can hardly fail to awaken the child in anyone who watches it. Unashamedly kitsch, and beautifully scored by Michel Legrand, Demy's third big budget musical is so charming that its main plot idea (a king wanting to marry his daughter) hardly seems to register on our inbuilt shock-o-meters. Just why shouldn't Jean Marais claim the delectable Catherine Deneuve as his bride? After all, she is the spitting image of his dead wife... Luckily, Deneueve has a friendly fairy (Delphine Seyrig) who has a far more traditional view of father-daughter relationships and so the happy ending is assured, but only after a miraculous jewel-excreting donkey has been butchered and skinned for the sake of fashion. Eat your heart out, Hans Christian Andersen.
Demy followed Peau d'Âne with an altogether different kind of fairytale, The Pied Piper (1972), based on the Pied Piper of Hamelin legend. The two films could hardly be more different. In contrast to the kitsch artificiality and exhausting chirpiness of Peau d'Âne, The Pied Piper is a pretty comfortless excursion into the squalor and penury of the Middle Ages, complete with wholesale peasant oppression, religious persecution and some utterly disgusting rats. It is the darkest of Demy's films and feels like an inversion of most of his other works. Whereas in, say, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, everyday life is presented as a fairytale, in The Pied Piper, a fairytale becomes grim and grubby reality. Demy's only British film, it was destined to be another flop, as was his next flight of fancy. L'Événement le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la Lune (1973) is a tame feminist comedy in which Catherine Deneueve succeeds in putting her husband Marcello Mastroianni in the family way (that will teach him not to take precautions). Once the obvious jokes have been dished up, the film rapidly runs out of steam and is clearly not one of Demy's more inspired works.
The country where Les Parapluies de Cherbourg had been most successful was Japan, and so it probably was not a great surprise to Demy when a Japanese film production company rang him up one day and invited him to make a film for its home market. Lady Oscar (1979) was based on a hugely popular Japanese manga, The Rose of Versailles, known to every teenage girl in Japan. Made in France, with a mainly English cast, the film is nothing more than a hyper-kitsch historical romp set during the French Revolution. After this foray into comic book escapism, Demy received another commission, this time from the French television company FR3, to adapt Colette's novel La Naissance du jour. Screened in 1980, this was to be Demy's only TV movie, and it was also the first film on which his adopted daughter Rosalie Varda worked as a costume designer.
Demy's next film, Une chambre en ville (1982), was to be one of his most daring and experimental, a bold (arguably mad) attempt to combine social realist drama with opera. Set against the backdrop of a workers' strike in an economically stagnant France of the early 1980s, the film is a modern re-working of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, with the star-crossed lovers (Richard Berry and Dominique Sanda) kept apart by that most unbridgeable of divides, class prejudice. The romanticism of the timeless story is effectively combined with the harsh reality of its contemporary setting, and as in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, every line of dialogue is sung. Whilst the film was not a commercial success, it did garner some very favourable reviews and it is generally considered to be the best of Demy's late films.
Then it's back into the realms of fantasy again. Parking (1985) is an updated rock version of the Orpheus legend, with Jean Maris (the star of Jean Cocteau's earlier Orphée) playing the part of The Devil. Demy's most oniric film, with some startling surreal flourishes, Parking was just too radical for its time, and was inevitably another flop. Trois places pour le 26 (1988), Demy's last solo film, was a welcome return to the exuberant American-style musical that had previously brought him fame and fortune. With a sprightly Yves Montand taking the lead role and Michel Legrand serving up another raft of catchy musical numbers, the film (a partial biography of Montand) could hardly fail. Unfortunately, Demy had fallen behind the times and the film was not a great success.
Jacques Demy's last contribution to cinema was a collaboration with the animator Paul Grimault, with whom he had started his career. La Table tournante (1988) is an affectionate retrospective of Grimault's work and includes excerpts from many of his best-known short films. Afterwards, Demy began to prepare another film, Kobi, but his health had by this time deteriorated to the point that he was unable to proceed with the project.
Jacques Demy died on October 27, 1990, age 59. At the time, it was stated that he died from leukaemia, but in 2008 Agnès Varda revealed that he had in fact been the victim of an AIDS-related illness. Demy was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, and ten years later a square in the 14th arrondissement of the capital was renamed Place Jacques-Demy in his honour. Partly through Varda's efforts, Demy's reputation as an auteur and film innovator has grown since his death, and his films are becoming increasingly popular. His work continues to inspire the latest generation of filmmakers, and some directors have even adopted the form that he pioneered. Arnaud Viard's Clara et moi (2004) and Christophe Honoré's Les Chansons d'amour (2007) are unashamed homages to Demy's films, and a recognition of his genius. They will probably not be the last. The cinema of Jacques Demy has a poetry and truth that transcends both time and culture, and whilst he is not presently recognised as such, he may yet come to be regarded as one of the most important cineastes of his generation.
© James Travers 2012
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