594 - The World of Jacques Demy, France, 1995. Dir. Agnes Varda.
Cinema is an act of great patience. - Jacques Demy.
Meeting Jacques so young was a formative event for me. He was the first real filmmaker I met. - Catherine Deneuve.
With his films we reclaim our childhood. - Caroline Bongrand.
Jacques Demy died on October 27, 1990, at the age of 59. From 1993 to 1995 his wife filmed, interviewed people, and edited footage together to make a 90 minute documentary in his honor.
His wife just happened to be herself a film director of renown. Agnes Varda.
Agnes Varda is alive today, and at age 90 she is still working. Which means Clint Eastwood at 88 has a couple years to go still. And counting.
Ms. Varda wrote and directed her first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1955. Seven years later she wrote and directed her famous film Cleo from 5 to 9 (1962). She wrote the theme song to Demy's Lola (1961). She appeared in a cameo as a nun in The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). She wrote the French dialogue for Bernardo Bertolucci's film Last Tango in Paris (1972). She played a role in the 2002 Jonathan Demme movie The Truth About Charlie, starring Mark Wahlberg, Thandie Newton, Tim Robbins, Stephen Dillane, and LisaGay Hamilton. And to date, she has made 13 feature films, nearly 30 short films, and 10 feature-length documentaries. Including this one.
In watching it, one senses the love that Jacques Demy and Agnes Varda had for each other. And the love that she has for him still.
Ms. Varda interviews people who worked with Jacques Demy over the years.
Including actors Anouk Aimee, Richard Berry, Nino Castelnuovo, Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Annie Duperoux, Francoise Fabian, Claude Mann, Marc Michel, Jeanne Moreau, Jacques Perrin, Michel Piccoli, Dominique Sanda, and Anne Vernon.
And collaborators Michel Legrand, Michel Columbier, filmmaker Claude Berri, Anne-Marie Cotret, Bernard Evein, Emmanuel Machuel, Annie Maurel, Bernard Toublanc-Michel, son Mathieu Demy, and daughter Rosalie Varda.
And his sister, Helene Demy,
And the great French film director Bertrand Tavernier.
We saw Tavernier's 1981 film Coup de Torchon.
Coup de Torchon
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/05/137-coup-de-torchon-1981-france-dir.html
In 2016 Bertrand Tavernier himself released a documentary feature called My Journey Through French Cinema (2016).
We have also seen two of Claude Berri's movies:
Jean de Florette (1986)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2018/03/434-jean-de-florette-france-1986-dir.html
Manon of the Spring (1986)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2018/03/435-manon-of-spring-france-1986-dir.html
Among other things, we learn:
It took them twenty years to make their first musical.
Jacques Demy grew up loving cinema. As a boy, he took film stock and hand painted each frame.
He filmed his own short films upstairs above a small barn.
He wanted his first film to be a full-color musical with singing and dancing. But his producer said he did not have enough money, so he encouraged him to make a black-and-white film first. He made Lola and began to make money.
Actors describe him as kind but firm. He was precise in his choices and expected adherence to them. But he was good with people and doted on his actors.
He says his deepest influence was Bresson. We have seen six Robert Bresson films.
After the war Demy saw my first Americn musicals. And he wanted to make one. He wanted an opera. He wanted it to be clear and simle, a kind of song throughout the film.
First hanky, page 38.
"We had a score full of hanky markings."
He said The Umbrellas of Cherbourg opened up doors all over the world.
He was excited about going to Hollywood. But he acted cool about it.
"I wanted to live in the U.S. Everything excited me."
He rented a white convertible.
"It's like a dream."
"I was really happy for two years."
Jacques Demy believed in the dream of discovering an unknown actor and making him a star.
He met an unknown actor named Harrison Ford.
In 1969. Four years before American Graffiti (1973). Eight years before Star Wars (1977).
He made screen tests of him. Agnas Varda shows us the screen tests. Including footage of Ford's holding the clapper and slating himself. Harrison Ford looks so young. He stares ahead calmly. Then he slowly breaks into that now-iconic half-smile.
Varda revisits Harrison Ford in Wyoming in 1995, and Harrison tells us the story.
The film was called Model Shop.
Because I was supposed to be in the film, Jacques and I went to visit the model shop on Santa Monica Blvd. Painted with Da-Glo paint.
We had to rent one of these little cameras and buy 12 exposures of of film for $35.
We chose the bedroom set. It's just like it was in the movie there. Long corridor. Painted black. Both of us very shy. Neither of us knew what to do, so the girl said I'll pose like this, and I'll pose like this.
The bed or the armchair? It doesn't matter.
Demy and Ford learn from the girl what to do. Demy likes Ford. He decides to cast him in the movie.
To which you ask, Wait a second: if Harrison Ford made a movie with Jacques Demy, how have I never heard of it?
Jacques Demy did make the movie Model Shop in 1969. Starring Gary Lockwood.
Who?
You know, the man who played himself last year in a movie called Unbelievable!!!!!. With five exclamation points. So that you will know how unbelievable it is.
You have not heard of it? It starred Snoop Dogg.
OK. How about Gary Lockwood, the man who appeared in a 2004 short film called Missing Sock.
Don't know that one? His daughter Samantha was in it. She has done some things.
All right. How about the 1990 film Terror in Paradise.
Well, at least he is still working. And he may very well be a great actor. We cannot all control what offers we get. Or what the directors do with them.
So why did Jacques Demy want Harrison Ford but go with Gary Lockwood?
We are told that Gary Lockwood just came off 2001: A Space Odyssey, where he played Dr. Frank Poole, and he was hot.
And then Harrison Ford looks directly at us in the camera and says,
"I'm told that the head of the studio said to forget me, that I had no future in this business."
After which he makes a classic Harrison Ford face. Which is worth the entire documentary.
By 1995 when this documentary came out, Harrison Ford had been in American Graffiti , The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. He had been Han Solo and Indiana Jones and Rick Deckard and Jack Ryan and Richard Kimble. And he had just played Linus Larrabee in the remake of Sabrina. How many men do you know who can redo a Humphrey Bogart character?
One imagines Agnas Varda smiling with delight as she was editing this section.
Model Shop was to have been the Lola sequel, with Lola in Los Angeles, California, instead of Nantes, France. Anouk Aimee came back to reprise her role. But this time the war was Vietnam. It was unpopular. The movie did not work.
Jacques Demy calls Model Shop a Model Flop.
Agnas Varda wonders what having Harrison Ford in it would have done for the movie.
Helene, Jacques' younger sister talks about how he kept learning and growing throughout his life. He learned English. He studied color processing. He took still photographs and blew up pictures using a new process. He did tests.
Varda shows his still photography, and it is incredible. It shows the touch of a professional eye. After the landscapes we see "the many faces" of his son Mathieu. And Mathieu has many.
At 50 he took up painting. He learned to fly. He went back to math.
Then they continue with the movies.
There is an informative section on The Pied Piper (1972).
It was a fairy tale Demy loved.
They hired hundreds trained rats. They were trained in England and shipped to Germany. And had to arrive 40 days early to spend 40 days in quarantene.
His biographer discusses how the film is gloomy and harsh yet "passing through all that was a magical grace."
Bertrand Tavernier says the shots are lyrical and that the camera movements are meshed with the sets and costumes. He feels Demy achieved his goals with that movie.
Then Demy is compared to the Pied Piper himself.
"He can lead anyone out of the city, whether it's into their dreams or away from their troubles."
"If I were a child, I'd want Jacques Demy as my father."
One artist made a replica of Jacques Demy out of flowers. A school is named for him. A street is named for him. RUE Jacques Remy.
It takes long time to become young. - Picasso
"Jacques is a child who grew up without forgetting his childhood."
There are several more great sections covering several more movies, with delicious insights from people who were either there or who appreciate the films.
Then we go to three girls on a bench. Including the middle one who opened our film with her letter. They were two young to have known him.
One imagines them singing an Elton John variant, "Goodbye Jacques Demy":
"And I would have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid."
They speak of his movies in the way that they have touched their hearts. They are not critics. They are fans. They are people for whom filmmakers make films. They do not speak objectively but subjectively. About how his films have touched their lives. They appreciate what he has accomplished. They appreciate him.
We pull back and pan over and see that they are sitting next to his grave, his wife returning to where she laid him to rest, sharing a moment with three people whom she would otherwise have never known. But for his bringing them together with his art. From his heart. To theirs.
* * * *
Sir, I've put off writing this letter for years. I wanted to grow up first so it wouldn't seem too childish. Yet writing now, I know it will still come out that way. Renoir wrote that the public is grateful to a director who shows how our front doorstep can lead to Sleeping Beauty's castle. Your films taught me so much that I write this to show my gratitude. They taught me to look at life by placing a magic screen over the bitter lucidity. They exhort us to run out to repaint the street with our gaze. Your films taught me to love life. In them it is both exalted and laid bare, both cruel and alluring. They give us a taste for joy and the strength to wait, while being heedful of everything. 'The thrill is in the anticipation,' could be the epigraph to Lola.
You are a truly original filmmaker. Only you can mix harmonious cocktail of varying predilections for painting, music, poetry, cafe philosophy, fairy tales, social critique, opera, American musicals, exotic and spiritual travels. ou give expression to a world both true and reinvented. I get high on your films. Excuse my tipsiness. I just wanted ot say thank you.
--Camille Taboulay.
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