593 - A Room in Town (Une Chambre en Ville), France, 1982. Dir. Jacques Demy.

Sunday, February 3, 2019

593 - A Room in Town (Une Chambre en Ville), France, 1982.  Dir. Jacques Demy.

Nantes, 1955.

Francois Guilbaud has a room in town.

He rents the room from the former Baronness, Madame Margot Langlois.  She has him stay in her daughter Edith's room, because she has refused to unlock her son's room since he died in a car crash while driving 110.  (If that is kph, it would be the equivalent of 68 mph.)  She says she does not have the courage to face all those memories again.

Francois is a pipefitter on strike.  He and his friend Dambiel have joined the team in solidarity to protest.  They have standoffs in the street, where they shout epithets at the police, who in turn use teargas to break them up.

Francois is dating Violette Peletier, who blushes like a violet when he holds her.  She is making plans for their future, but he is on hold since he has no income and cannot afford to provide for them.  He shares his frustrations with his friend Dambiel, while Violette shares her frustrations with her mother Madame Pelletier.  She also carries a secret.

Mme. Langlois' daughter Edith got married a month ago, to TV repair store owner Edmond Leroyer.  He has already proved to be jealous, paranoid, and possessive.  He will not give her money; he demands to know her every move; and he threatens to hurt her if she does anything he does not like.  We see him push her and run into her wrist with a soldering iron.

Edith sees a fortuneteller, who tells her that the cards tell her that she will have a great love affair with a metalworker.  Edith has taken to the old profession as a means of retaliating against her husband.  She walks the street in a long fur coat.

She has a room in town because she no longer has her room at home.


Something is going to happen in each of those rooms.  And in the room outside of one of those rooms.  Because of what happened in the street, and in the street, and in the street.  And because of what happened in another room.

And it might turn out very well for everybody.  Or at least for a few people.  Or one or two.

Or it might turn out poorly for one or two.  Or for a few.  Or for everybody.

But it will turn out.  The train has left the station and it will not stop until it arrives at its final destination.  In the unity of time.  All the action takes place in about a twenty-four-hour period.

With Une Chambre en Ville, Jacques Demy has made another singing musical, like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), where all the dialogue is sung.  No song lyrics.  And no spoken dialogue.  Just sung dialogue from start to finish.

He has a new composer, though.  He uses Michel Colombier rather than longtime collaborator Michel Legrand, who was working on Barbra Streisand's Yentl (1983).  And the musical tone is different.

Likewise, the production design.  Bernard Evein does return, but his highly coordinated, beautifully rich colors are darker and more muted to fit the subject matter.

The iconic transporter bridge in Nantes no longer existed, so Demy had it painted on glass and filmed through the glass to show the bridge as being there again.

In The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), Maxence the sailor/painter/poet make a reference to this film which will come out 15 years later.  First, he praises painting.  "Braque, Picasso, Klee, Miro, Matisse--that's life!"  A gentleman sitting at a table reading a newspaper joins the conversation to ask, "Don't tell me you paint in the barracks," to which Mexence replies, "I have a room in town.  It's my studio.  Every night I go AWOL, and I go home and paint."