Jacquot de Nantes (1991)
Directed by Agnès Varda

Film Review

Agnès Varda began her trilogy of films commemorating the life and work of her husband Jacques Demy with this intensely evocative account of his childhood, which was spent mostly in the vicinity of the French sea town of Nantes, the location of two of his films: Lola (1961) and Une chambre en ville (1982).  At the time Varda made the film, Demy was in the last stages of what was later revealed to be an AIDS-related illness, and he passed away just ten days after filming was completed.  By combining her husband's fragmentary recollections of his predominantly happy childhood with excerpts from his films and intimate shots of Demy in his last weeks of life Varda crafts her most personal and enchanting film, one that reveals far more about her fondness and admiration for Demy than it does about the great man himself.  Varda followed up this film with a tribute to one of his best known films, Les Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans (1993), and then a more extensive retrospective of his work in L'Univers de Jacques Demy (1995).

The idea for Jacquot de Nantes came about when Demy, then too ill to continue his filmmaking career, began writing up a detailed account of his childhood experiences.  It was Varda who suggested turning these haphazard recollections into a film, but with Demy unable to make the film himself, she offered to do so under his close supervision.  So committed was she to portraying Demy's childhood as authentically as possible that Varda insisted on using the real locations where he grew up, including the garage that had once been owned by his father.  This created problems when Demy's condition deteriorated - the production had to be completed in the studio, so that Demy could oversee filming whilst receiving medical treatment.  Because most of the film is shot in black and white (a good choice for what is effectively a nostalgia piece), the spectator hardly notices this switch, and Varda succeeds in bringing a near-documentary realism to the film, aided by the low key performances from her cast of unknown but very capable actors.

Varda's central thesis is that Demy's childhood had an enormous impact on his work as a film director, and she illustrates this by making connections between incidents in his childhood and what we find in his films.  The most apparent instance of art imitating life is Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), which features a garage very similar to the one in which Demy's father worked.  The Passage Pommeraye in Nantes (a favourite haunt of the surrealists in the 1920s) also features prominently in the film - this is after all the place where Demy attended a ciné-club as a teenager and bought his first film camera; it provided a memorable location for his first film Lola.

Of greater interest is the film's meticulous account of how Demy developed his early interest in cinema, a fascination with puppet theatre which rapidly evolved into a mania for stop motion animation.  Demy's withdrawal from the real world into his own private fantasy world at an early age is pointedly accounted for by his having to witness the Allies' bombing of Nantes in 1943, an event that left him with a lifelong revulsion for violence of any kind.  The vitality and strained optimism that are apparent in many of Demy's films can be seen as an attempt to compensate for the traumas he lived through during WWII, in particular the interminable air-raids and roundup of hostages by the Nazis.

Jacquot de Nantes presents us not only with an insightful depiction of the formative years of a great filmmaker but also a movingly authentic portrait of childhood (one that is every bit as truthful and unsentimental as Truffaut's Les 400 coups).  Apart from his obsession with filmmaking, the young Jacques Demy that Varda reveals to us is very much an ordinary boy from an ordinary family, his dreams constantly under threat from the painful realities of his working class existence.  Had Demy been just a little less bloody-minded (and just a little less fortunate) he could so easily have ended up following in his father's footsteps, living his life as an obscure garage mechanic in an anonymous little town - the names Cherbourg and Rochefort would hold no special significance and Catherine Deneuve could have given up acting at the age of 18...

What makes Varda's film so special is how intensely it conveys Demy's early, all-consuming passion for filmmaking, without which he would never have overcome the almost insuperable obstacles that stood in the way of him becoming a professional filmmaker.  There is something deeply inspiring in seeing the young Demy dedicate himself so fully to his art, creating marvels with next to no resources other than his skill and commitment.  It is odd but strangely fitting that the film should end on a more solemn note.  Demy's résumé of his life in a few terse phrases, followed by a last glimpse of him lying on the beach near Nantes, a time-worn relic redolent of Shelley's Ozymandias, instantly extinguishes the warm glow of nostalgia and reminds us of the tragic brevity of human existence with a brutal succinctness.   There's a bitter irony in the fact that a film which starts out as a celebration of one man's childhood should end with a sombre reflection on mortality.

Film Synopsis

In the late 1930s, 8-year-old Jacques Demy lives with his father, a garage mechanic, and mother, a hairdresser, in a small town near to the large seaport of Nantes.  Known as Jacquot, the little boy enjoys an idyllic existence, regularly attending puppet shows and acting out his fantasies with his brother Yvon and sister Hélène.  Then came the war, the Nazi occupation and Allied bombings, all of which would make a deep impression on the young Jacquot.  After the war, now a teenager, Jacquot has become a budding amateur filmmaker.  He devotes all of his free time to making animated films in a small attic, believing that one day he will be able to pursue a career in cinema.  His father dismisses this as a childish pipedream and forces his son to enrol at a technical college, expecting that he will take after him and become a mechanic.  Jacquot has no intention of giving up his dream just yet.  Filmmaking is in his blood...