Catherine Deneuve is a bit like Garbo in that we as an audience have always projected our own fantasies onto her phenomenal beauty; like Garbo, so much of Deneuve's beauty is in the allure of her heavy eyelids and in the space between those lids and her arched eyebrows. Unlike Garbo, Deneuve is a blond, the ultimate blond, in fact, and she has maintained that perilous status long past the age Garbo retired and went into semi-hiding to preserve her legend. After seeing Luis Buñuel's Tristana (1970), one of the movies playing in BAM's month-long Deneuve retrospective, that ultimate blond enthusiast, Alfred Hitchcock, marveled to Buñuel at a Hollywood party about the last third of the film, where Deneuve's former innocent in pigtails has been transformed into a haughty woman whose artificial leg only adds to her sex appeal. "Tristana's false leg," Hitchcock kept murmuring to Buñuel, at a loss for words at the fetishistic power of this image. Continue Reading »
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Posts Tagged: Jacques Demy
A Firm Hand: Catherine Deneuve at BAM
by Dan Callahan on March 5th, 2011 at 9:19 am in Film
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
by Veronika Ferdman on November 1st, 2010 at 11:30 pm in Film
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is undeniably one of my top 10 or 20 favorite films, but depending on the day of the week, it may or may not be my favorite Demy. Sometimes it's too arrestingly colorful, the melancholy in Guy's eyes too insistent, and its close-mouthed truth too loud. It is one of the most beautiful things committed to celluloid, and as it often is with Demy, deceptively simple, while being actively, yet cat-foot quietly sad. This film confirms my worst fears about love. There's no such thing as a Great love, or else, it doesn't last; time obscures feelings and memories and what was once indelible becomes lost in a weed-molested corner of the mind.
This is Demy's most popular and heralded film (winning the Palme D'Or at Cannes in 1964), the one that makes it out of the footnotes and into the meat of rapturous paragraphs of history and theory books. Gloriously shot by Jean Rabier, Demy's cinematographer on his previous film, Bay of Angels, and scored by an inspired Michel Legrand. Out of all of the music he has composed, and out of all the collaborations with Demy, Legrand will forever be remembered for his work on this film. Also, this was the first film to have every single word of dialogue sung (though the voices are far from flawless), making it closer to an opera than a musical. Continue Reading »
Toronto International Film Festival 2010: Day 5 – Potiche, Essential Killing, and Cave of Forgotten Dreams
by Fernando F. Croce on September 15th, 2010 at 9:27 pm in Festivals, Film
Potiche: More like Pastiche. Back in kitschy-feminist 8 Women mode, François Ozon channels Jacques Demy (pink umbrellas and all) for this plush hymn to the fabulosity of all things Catherine Deneuve. The campy tone is set in the opening sequence, as French cinema's knowing empress is introduced in a jogging tracksuit and tasteful curlers, cooing at fawns and winking at squirrels. It's 1977 and she plays the docile wife of a right-wing, openly unfaithful industrialist (Fabrice Luchini). When her husband is hospitalized after a clash with striking workers, she dons her best pearls and furs and heads out to run the factory with her adult children, reactionary Papa's girl Judith Godreche and queer-eyed artist Jeremy Renier. Though larded with lines like "Paternalism is dead" and "The personal is political," Ozon's romp is less interested in charting a bourgeois wife's private revolution than in doting on feathery coifs, split-screens, and geometric wallpaper. Deneuve does plenty of elegantly funny swanning, and works up iconic poignancy with Gerard Depardieu (as her unionist-turned-mayor ex-lover). It feels churlish to carp when a star is having so much fun, though I wish the material didn't play like a Gallic remake of Mamma Mia! Continue Reading »
A Woman and a Roulette Wheel: Bay of Angels
by Veronika Ferdman on August 27th, 2010 at 12:44 pm in Film
My first viewing of Bay of Angels was some years ago. I remembered it as a sweeping romance between two beautiful faces, forgetting entirely that a great deal of the romance occurs not between a man and a woman, but between a woman and a roulette wheel. In Bay of Angels, Jacques Demy pares down the multitude of intertwining love stories found in Lola, relating the points of a love triangle.
Jean (Claude Mann), a young bank clerk, catches the gambling bug from a coworker. He decides to take his vacation in the South of France where he runs into and falls in love with Jacqueline (Jeanne Moreau), a woman who would in all likelihood use her own child as collateral if it meant having another go at the roulette table. Continue Reading »
Jacques Demy's Lola
by Veronika Ferdman on April 14th, 2010 at 12:30 am in Film
Pick up any book on the French New Wave and the exploits of the young Turks of the Right Bank, (Godard-Truffaut-Rohmer-Rivette-Chabrol) are well-chronicled with enthusiasm and awe. Such texts also include a chapter or so on the Left Bank, i.e. Resnais-Varda-Marker. And within there, there's maybe, like, a sentence, or if we're really lucky, a paragraph, on Jacques Demy, (once, and this was a real surprise, I found a book with three consecutive pages devoted to him).
Look, if I had to spend the rest of my life watching films from the directors born out of one period/movement it would be those of the New Wave. And the aforementioned stars of the Right and Left bank (literally determined by whether they lived on the right or left bank of Paris, as well as the Left's initial bent toward experimental as well as more politically radical cinema), there's not a single director (with the exception of Marker, a soon to be corrected blind spot) whose work I don't absolutely love. I sincerely cannot imagine my life without Le Mepris, or Je t'aime, je t'aime, or Jules et Jim. But sometimes, the screaming and embittered politics of certain auteurs, or the prevalence of talk-over-action protagonists, gets a little wearying.
But Demy's different. Continue Reading »
Ryan McGinley Madness at Team Gallery
by Dan Callahan on March 21st, 2010 at 12:30 pm in Photos
March 18th, at 5:55pm or so, there was already a sizable group of people waiting to get into Ryan McGinley's new show of black and white photographic portraits at Team Gallery, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (through April 17). Mainly they were young people, and some of them were the subjects of the nude photos themselves.
Some of them even shyly stood next to their nudes, but a few of them looked sweetly skittish when anyone asked them to pose with their portrait. McGinley is known for his nude subjects, but he skirts all obvious sexual appeal; he likes physical awkwardness, and if this awkwardness is erotic, it's disarming, pimply, bad breath eroticism, the kind that emerges from low expectations, good weed and the ability to laugh at practically anything.
McGinley achieves his distinctive romanticism in a roundabout way that depends on killing any idealized ideas about people and their skin and the images they present the world. I was born in 1977, the same year as McGinley, and I spent my early twenties hanging out in New Jersey, so I feel like the world of most of his photos is a world I know and love. What sets his work apart is the little stab at utopia that McGinley is trying to provide, the kind of utopia where we don't care if we're gay or straight or beautiful or homely but we all dissolve into each other as a group of arms and legs and blissfully stoned minds. At his best, his work reminds me of the films of Jacques Demy, another gay dreamer who did his best work in praise of heterosexual love fantasies of both triumph (Lola, 1961) and defeat (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964).
Film Comment Selects 2010: The Aviator's Wife
by Aaron Cutler on March 5th, 2010 at 4:00 pm in Festivals, Film
When I learned of Eric Rohmer's death this past January, I didn't feel sadness so much as soft, lingering melancholy, like the characters in his films do when they lose their new loves. I'd pegged the oldest of the French New Wave directors as a fuddy-duddy, the man who insisted on staying behind to edit Cahiers du Cinéma once the boys had left for the world. He was 47 years old when he directed his first feature film, 1967's La Collectioneuse—almost a decade older than his peers, and unfurling on screens nearly a decade after their films had boldly proclaimed themselves. Rohmer's were quieter. Unlike Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, and Chabrol, who changed styles like hats in the name of reinventing cinema, Rohmer's approach stayed relatively constant: a sun-dappled medium or long shot, a man and a woman toying with each other in the frame. Continue Reading »
Tags: Andrew Sarris, Eric Rohmer, Film Comment Selects, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Jean-Luc Godard, Marie Rivière, My Night at Maud's, Philippe Marlaud, The Aviator's Wife
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