Jacques Demy’s last and mostly overlooked film is a perfect ending
to his career, as beautiful and joyous and yet quietly transgressive as all his
best work. Yves Montand (himself only two films from the end, as it turned out)
plays (some version of) himself, returning to his childhood home town of
Marseille for a stage show based on his own life (Demy visualizes the show with
just the right amount of warmly cheesy intricacy), while also hoping to find
his old love (Francoise Fabian); she’s living in genteel poverty after her
once-rich husband got sent to jail, with a headstrong daughter (Mathilda May)
who adores Montand and gets a part in the show, falling for him and then sleeping
with him, after which she rapidly learns that she just committed incest with
her biological father. Needless to say, few musicals have taken the inwardly winding
nature of genre plotting to such a point, although the speed and equanimity
with which those involved shake it off and move on is equally notable. The film
has great fun with the Montand persona, acknowledging the cornerstones of his
biography, including his legendary love affairs (Piaf, Signoret, Monroe) and apparently
ongoing virility, while suggesting suppressed shadows and secrets; it’s as
flexible with the musical form itself, at first giving us a world where characters
break into song and dance in classic style; then in its latter stages confining
the performance to the stage. And just as it channels Montand, there’s the
sense of a shadow portrait of Demy himself – another kind of return, heavy with
allusions to and parallels with earlier works, and with something always beyond
reach, summed up in the film’s final, almost offhand moments, reminiscent of
how The Young Girls of Rochefort placed the long-awaited meeting of its
star-crossed lovers just beyond the final scene.
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