Lady Oscar (Jacques Demy, 1979)

Lady Oscar is certainly one of Jacques Demy’s less prominent films, with a persistently displaced feeling about it: set in France during the decade or so leading up to the Revolution, but made in English with mostly Japanese money. It may sound in summary like a gender-bending swashbuckler - Oscar is born a woman but raised as a boy to satisfy her father’s desire for a male heir, becoming a personal guard to Marie Antoinette -  but doesn’t feel particularly queered: except for one scene in which she dances with and kisses another woman (entirely to demonstrate her resistance to an unwanted suitor), there’s no suggestion that Oscar is anything other than a slow-to-awaken heterosexual woman, whose awakening as a woman coincides with that as a socially aware citizen, coinciding further with the radicalization of the populace as a whole. Compared to the striking grubbiness of Demy’s Pied Piper, the film often feels overly antiseptic, consisting largely of stiff exchanges in fancy rooms, with a central character that’s as much observer as meaningful participant. At times, certainly, the distancing can be rather stimulating - to that point I couldn’t quite decide on the merits of Catriona MacColl’s well-spoken but largely blank lead performance – and Demy often seems as interested in secondary narratives of female deception and adaptation, including the Queen’s self-serving materialism and infidelity, and another character who lies her way from poverty into money, each instance adding fuel to the popular anger that sparks the Revolution. It’s certainly interesting how Oscar’s ultimate arrival at a sense of self is immediately followed by a kind of obliteration, as she suffers her greatest personal loss, while submerged in the jubilant crowd: as such Lady Oscar looks ahead to Demy’s often quietly tortured-seeming, much underrated late run of work, in which a musical number might be as likely to accompany suicide or incest as to articulate more conventional sentiments.