Jacques Demy

This year marks the 60th anniversary of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, one of the many masterpieces by Jacques Demy (1931 - 1990), which was the subject of a painstaking 4K restoration presented at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna by Damien Chazelle. In recent decades, new generations have discovered the filmmaker's work and his films have stood the test of time, are still alive, and are the subject of new readings and re-appropriations. His influence goes beyond cinema and extends, for example, to music (let's not forget that the great Michel Legrand was always close to him), fashion and design. It's therefore time to “re-discover Demy”, and to show him in a cycle that is practically complete, discovering lesser-seen films that are true gems, in restored copies and with several unreleased in Portuguese cinemas. - Medeia Films

Jacques Demy by Jean Douchet

I met Demy in 1956-1957, after he made Le sabotier du Val de Loire and before he shot Le bel indifférent. It was from then on that we formed a lasting friendship. I loved meeting him, talking to him. We had great camaraderie and I think for Bay of Angels he was inspired a little by me, by my interest, let's say “excessive”, in a certain era, in roulette games and casinos.

He had a great kindness in his relationship with others. He was kind, but very British: as soon as he got something into his head, there was no point in trying to get him to change his mind! He had precise ideas and didn't give up on them. This was very powerful, as his gentleness made us believe that we could influence him. This can be seen in his way of conceiving cinema, of dealing with a subject. And you can also feel it: it's a cinema made from very strong a priori and he works on it.

With Le sabotier du Val de Loire, an admirable documentary, he was not at all in the spirit of the “Nouvelle Vague”. In fact, he became unmistakably Nouvelle Vague when he turned to fiction with Le bel indifférent. It's true that it's a play by Cocteau, but he films it choosing the very Nouvelle Vague aesthetic option of a play filmed as such, without trying to make a fiction film. The décor - the red wallpaper, the bright colors - and its artificiality are filmed as a reality. Even if he was still experimenting, we felt that Demy would be a true metteur en scène who would impose, gently, it is true, an imaginary and a style of his own. But we were still far from imagining that one day he would turn a city into the décor of The Young Girls of Rochefort, repainting 40,000 m2 of façades!

I said somewhere that Demy was “the most metteur en scène of the French metteurs en scène” of his time. He is, in fact, close to Minnelli, and shares the same interest in the opposition between dream and reality, the décor as an emanation of both dream and reality. With Donkey's Skin, The Pied Piper, Lola or The Young Girls of Rochefort, like Minnelli, he is in the realm of enchantment, of the marvelous. But Minnelli's cinema works in the realm of the fantastic, typical of 19th century romanticism, in other words, the idea of a world that exists alongside or beyond reality, and even vampirizes reality. Demy is more interested in the marvelous as it was conceived in the 17th century, a marvelous manufactured by man, by his machines. This wonder is also the machinery of the world, the fairground carousels that are set up at the beginning of The Young Girls of Rochefort, for example, as well as the machinery of cinema, the camera movements, the travellings or the cranes, the machining of the décors and their colors. It's also the wonder of intrigue, the dramatic machinations based on chance and encounters. In both cases, Minnelli and Demy, cinema is based on spectacle.