Artificial Splendor: A Trio by Jacques Demy
THE FILMMAKER Jacques Demy came of age artistically in the early Sixties, shortly after his compatriots François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard initiated the French New Wave with The 400 Blows, , and in 1959 and 1960. Yet the work he was involved in at the same time as these pioneers and the other representatives of the New Wave—including Agnès Varda, whom he married in 1962 and who survived him by nearly three decades—was markedly different from theirs. He was a master of artifice, more strongly influenced by the sometimes surrealist, sometimes symbolist Jean Cocteau than he was by Jean Renoir, as well as by Walt Disney, puppet shows, and the popular music of the Thirties and Forties. Varda made a wonderful film about his childhood, , in 1991: it chronicles his growing-up years in the seaport of Nantes and his early efforts at home-crafted animation, which shaped his life more powerfully than the world war that broke out when he was eight and ended when he was fourteen. Demy made short films in the Fifties, both documentary and fiction; four of them—Les , , (based on a play Cocteau wrote for Edith Piaf), and be viewed on Prime. But it was his first , the 1961 , that put him on the map, and the two features that followed it, (1963) and (1964), that kept him there. Demy drew on a love of fairy tales and Hollywood musicals and a rapt romanticism that combines buoyancy and melancholy. These three pictures—about the passion of a cabaret singer for a departed lover, which never dies; the love of a young man for a compulsive gambler, which seems doomed but, unpredictably, has a happy conclusion; and the love of two innocents which can’t survive the intrusions of the world—are fragile, evanescent delicacies made of mood and implausibly sustained high style.
