San Francisco International Film Festival 20 April - 04 May 2006

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Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961) was an epiphany of poetic neorealism—as modern as a white Cadillac but with a fairy-tale quality in which past and present crystallized into one emotion. The World of Jacques Demy, Agnes Varda’s documentary study of her husband, who died in 1990, shows how this enchanted first film led to one of the most unusual, certainly one of the riskiest and perhaps still underappreciated, oeuvres in cinema. Demy gave new meaning to the “all-singing” picture in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and the less-known A Room in Town, in which all the dialogue was sung, incorporating musical and opera but resembling neither. In these and other films we see that there also is a dark side to Demy, whose romantic cynicism is a strange synthesis of Max Ophuls and Jean Cocteau, with Minnelli thrown in for color. Demy’s working method is revealed in discussions with the composer Michel Legrand and with actors including Anouk Aimée, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Dominique Sanda and Michel Piccoli. In the words of one craftsman, “We felt crude compared to the purity he sought.” In the puckish spirit of her husband, Varda unexpectedly turns up a gardener who pruned an homage to Demy and a woman whose life was liberated by Lola. But it is Anouk Aimée who, continuing la ronde, can’t remember where Lola ends and she begins.

—Judy Bloch

Copyright © 2006 San Francisco Film Society