Jacques Demy on DVD

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zedz
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#76 Post by zedz » Mon Nov 17, 2008 12:17 am

I can add more of the same: amazing set (the ridiculous 'party-streamer' booklet is sort of horrible and awesome at the same time) but I've only quickly glimpsed at a couple of transfers, and they look fine.

The two I sampled were Bay of Angels (which I'd already seen on the R1 release) and Trois places pour le 26.

It also just occurred to me that the set isn't quite "integrale", since it omits La Table tournante, his last feature directed in collaboration with Paul Grimault. It's easy to see why it was omitted, since it's much more about Grimault (it's a career retrospective), but it is delivered with Demy's lightness. Completists can find it on the French 2DVD of Le Roi et l'oiseau

EDIT:
(Slightly) more transfer information:
I did a quick comparison between these discs and the only two Demy discs I already owned and found little difference.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg seemed to be pretty much identical to the Optimum UK disc - looked very good.
Bay of Angels looked like the same transfer, but ever so slightly better (fewer artifacts?) than the R1 edition. This may be simply a PAL / NTSC issue. Grainy in that fabulous opening shot, but good.

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zedz
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#77 Post by zedz » Wed Nov 19, 2008 4:25 pm

Working my way through this set, so here are some more reports.

The subtitles on the features are very well done - complete, idoiomatic. The unsubbed extras (so far) seem to all be very short (3 minutes tops): filmmakers making a few salient points, contextual intros read out by Mathieu Demy or brief extracts of Demy himself talking about the film in question. It's generally straightforward stuff and I've been able to follow 60-70% of what's been said with my primitive French. The first substantial extra I've come across - Varda's feature-length L'Univers de Jacques Demy is subtitled.

The transfers are generally excellent, though there does seem to be a rule of thumb that films with existing transfers simply use those transfers (see below for more detail).

I'm trying to work through the films chronologically. Here's what I've seen so far:

Le Pont des Mauves / Attaque nocturne / La Ballerine (1944-53) - These three lost animated films are represented by the careful recreations generated for Jacquot de Nantes in 1990. Varda used the remnants of the films where possible (damaged frames, puppets) and Demy oversaw their authenticity. Superb transfers, though they were artfully 'aged' for the film.

Les Horizons morts (1951) - Lovely transfer of a not bad print (various inherent / lab flaws, but not particularly worn). This is such a student film, steeped in adolescent angst (romantic rejection leads to despair - but wait! - there's still hope!). Attractively shot, with arty compositions, and the sometimes incongruous 'narrative' music looks ahead to mature Demy.

Le Sabotier du Val de Loire (1955) - A beautifully shot, moving regional documentary presented here in a gorgeous, sharp and textured transfer.

Le Bel Indifferent (1957) - Stunning transfer of a fascinating film, in which Demy shows us just how much he has to offer working with colour. This self-consciously stagy rendering of a Cocteau monologue takes place in a deeply saturated red room with forest green drapes, with Jeanne Allard (in gren / black velvet) enacting the mise en scene before our eyes (she's both main actor and key element of the art direction).

Ars (1959) - Another great black-and-white transfer, and a really interesting short, with Demy taking a typical short subject ('great man' biography) and turning it into a Left Bank essay film, with the elegant visuals (tracking shots through empty streets etc.) free-associating against the narration.

Lola (1960) - Just a quick glimpse of this. An OK transfer, but it seems to be lacking in detail. It looks like a pre-existing transfer done several years ago now, but I don't have anything with which to compare it.

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Yojimbo
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Re:

#78 Post by Yojimbo » Wed Nov 19, 2008 6:34 pm

Lino wrote:The most amazing news have arrived! I emailed Cine Tamaris about the english subs and I already got a reply this morning:
Bonsoir,

Je voudrais savoir, si possible, si le Jacques Demy 12 DVD coffret qui sortira le prochain 5 Novembre aura des sous-titres anglais?

Merci,

Lino Ramos

Portugal
Cher Lino Ramos,

Il y aura des sous-titres anglais, nous l’avons souhaité... mais uniquement sur les films, car nous n’avions ni temps, ni argent (c’est un peu synonyme !) pour sous-titrer les nombreux bonus.

RV au 5 novembre sur notre site ou sur le site d’Arte vidéo notamment (et pour le moment en PJ) !

Quant à Agnès VARDA, après la sortie de son film LES PLAGES D’AGNES (cf. PJ), programmé en salle en France en décembre prochain, après quelques festivals (dont la Mostra où elle a triomphé), nous travaillerons l’année prochaine à une intégrale, espérant pouvoir être prêts fin 2009...

Bien à vous,

Stéphanie Scanvic
p. Ciné-Tamaris
So, english subs on the movies but not on the extras (fair enough) and an Integrale Agnes Varda for 2009! How about that for the DVD scoop of 2008, hey? :D Start saving those euros, people - and yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus after all!
Just when I thought it was safe 'to go back in the water' after availing of Deep Discount and Amazon sale offers, and pre-ordering MoC's 'L'Argent', now you tell me this!
I've been scouring all sources for 'The Model Shop' for years and, though I have all his other main films, this does look very enticing.

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Lino
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#79 Post by Lino » Wed Nov 19, 2008 9:55 pm

It is more than enticing: it's essential. Oh, and zedz: the docu on the Demoiselles de Rochefort disc (Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans, directed by Varda and running aprox. an hour) is also subtitled. And you're right, most of the unsubbed extras are not that important to miss out on for non-french speaking buyers.

I'm currently devouring the set in a non-chronological way. My mood of each day dictates what I'm going to watch next and so far, it's working brilliantly. Watched The Pied Piper the other day for the first time ever and enjoyed it immensely. What a bleak little movie it is. The great thing about Demy's movies is that you can always look at them from at least two different angles, these being the beauty of the images on offer and the underlying social commentary.

Worthy of note is the fact that A Slightly Pregnant Man has a choice of choosing between the original french track and the english dubbed one. This also applies to The Pied Piper, though vice-versa. Oh, and I can now say that I changed my mind about Parking: though not one of his best movies, it's now no longer in my mind as one of his worst (has he even made a bad one? think not).

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domino harvey
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#80 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 19, 2008 10:32 pm

Do the dubbed films still have English subs?

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zedz
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#81 Post by zedz » Thu Nov 20, 2008 9:17 pm

domino harvey wrote:Do the dubbed films still have English subs?
No.

From what I see, there are four films in the set with English audio tracks: Model Shop, The Pied Piper, Lady Oscar and L'evenement le plus important. . .. None seem to have English subs, but that's only a major issue with the last one, since English is the original language for the other three (The Pied Piper having, according to the documentation, two versions originales).

I'm also assuming that L'evenement le plus important. . . is partly in English (haven't seen it yet), since the French version also includes a French subtitle track to cover the non-French bits (which I couldn't locate on a quick skim through it).

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domino harvey
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#82 Post by domino harvey » Thu Nov 20, 2008 11:14 pm

L'evenement le plus important
That's a shame on principle, but if any Demy film was going to be ruined like that, I couldn't have done a better job of selecting the doomed title myself. Thanks for the info, I can't wait to pick up this set after Christmas

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zedz
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#83 Post by zedz » Sun Nov 23, 2008 4:58 pm

Further reports:

I forgot to mention La Luxure last time, Demy's episode of Les sept peches capitaux. A charming, discursive film (with a great pre-psychedelic vision of Hell) in a sharp transfer.

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, probably my favourite Demy, looks great at a glance. As Lino noted, Varda's fine hour-long documentary has English subs and a good transfer, considering some of it was shot on video.

Model Shop: I'd been wanting to see this for some time, but it's a bit of a debacle. It has some of the qualities of Zabriskie Point, but it's both not as bad as Antonioni's film and not as good. Demy offers a great outsider's vision of LA (but not as visionary as Antonioni's America) with a nice modish soundtrack (by Spirit, who also appear in the film, but apart from Jay Ferguson they can't seem to get off the screen fast enough), but the film is scuppered by a mediocre script (that never reaches the depths of Zabriskie Point) and poor performances (ditto, but squared).

Gary Lockwood isn't particularly bad - not in a Mark Frechette way, certainly - but he isn't particularly good either, and the film hangs on his every bland gesture and line-reading. Anouk Aimee is similarly okay, but a rather thin approximation of her previous turn as Lola, and there's nil chemistry with Lockwood. The film is filled with cliches. Lockwood is that icon of sixties alienation, the disaffected architect, and is completely unconvincing as such, and the film is full of other cookie-cutter symbols of contemporary malaise, trotted out on cue but then just lying there limply: the paradise-paving parking lot, the aspirational colour television. At least the pounding derrick on the front steps has some visual interest.

Lockwood's girlfriend is the character most shamelessly abused by the film's callow politics. She has some truly unholy mouthfuls to deliver and is utterly inadequate to the cruel challenge.

The transfer is sharp, and comes from a flawless print, but it's very red. That's clearly intended to some degree - Demy places fire-engine red objects in many frames - but the skin-tones seem unfortunate, with Lockwood looking sunburnt rather than tanned throughout.

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zedz
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#84 Post by zedz » Mon Nov 24, 2008 4:33 pm

I knew my kevyip was enchanted.

A day after watching Model Shop I happened to watch Jerzy Skolimowski's 1964 Rysopis / Identification Marks: None and was amazed to find that Demy's film is essentially a remake of it.

SPOILERS AHOY, I guess, but neither film is primarily about its plot. Both films follow their disaffected male protagonists on their last day of freedom before being drafted into the military (and they both, somewhat improbably, find out about their imminent drafting during the course of the film's events). Skolimowski's timeframe is more compressed (morning and afternoon) than Demy's (24 hours).

In both films the protagonist has dropped out of his chosen career path (architect, museum director - though by the time Demy made his film the 'dropout' had become a cultural cliche) and is living off / with a woman to whom he isn't married (both women work in the advertising industry, but in different capacities). The film also chronicles the conveniently coincidental disintegration of that relationship, as the woman's affections have been transferred to other men.

Both protagonists amble around their town, doing variations on the same things:
- they run into old friends;
- they borrow money from them (100 zlotych, 100 dollars) which they end up giving away;
- they call their mothers from somebody else's business phone (and lie to them about what they're doing with their lives);
- they stalk and confront a model that they've impulsively become obsessed with (this strand is expanded significantly in Demy's film to make way for the Lola connections);
- they lose the thing to which they're most attached (a dog, a car).

Stylistically, however, the two films are completely different. Skolimowski's film is a wild ride in raw black and white, pushing Nouvelle Vague experimentation to extremes and often slipping into a first-person mode. It's also considerably shorter and much more successful on its own terms, unburdened by 'big statement' aspirations / expectations.

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Yojimbo
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#85 Post by Yojimbo » Mon Nov 24, 2008 7:42 pm

zedz wrote:Further reports:

I forgot to mention La Luxure last time, Demy's episode of Les sept peches capitaux. A charming, discursive film (with a great pre-psychedelic vision of Hell) in a sharp transfer.

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, probably my favourite Demy, looks great at a glance. As Lino noted, Varda's fine hour-long documentary has English subs and a good transfer, considering some of it was shot on video.

Model Shop: I'd been wanting to see this for some time, but it's a bit of a debacle. It has some of the qualities of Zabriskie Point, but it's both not as bad as Antonioni's film and not as good. Demy offers a great outsider's vision of LA (but not as visionary as Antonioni's America) with a nice modish soundtrack (by Spirit, who also appear in the film, but apart from Jay Ferguson they can't seem to get off the screen fast enough), but the film is scuppered by a mediocre script (that never reaches the depths of Zabriskie Point) and poor performances (ditto, but squared).

Gary Lockwood isn't particularly bad - not in a Mark Frechette way, certainly - but he isn't particularly good either, and the film hangs on his every bland gesture and line-reading. Anouk Aimee is similarly okay, but a rather thin approximation of her previous turn as Lola, and there's nil chemistry with Lockwood. The film is filled with cliches. Lockwood is that icon of sixties alienation, the disaffected architect, and is completely unconvincing as such, and the film is full of other cookie-cutter symbols of contemporary malaise, trotted out on cue but then just lying there limply: the paradise-paving parking lot, the aspirational colour television. At least the pounding derrick on the front steps has some visual interest.

Lockwood's girlfriend is the character most shamelessly abused by the film's callow politics. She has some truly unholy mouthfuls to deliver and is utterly inadequate to the cruel challenge.

The transfer is sharp, and comes from a flawless print, but it's very red. That's clearly intended to some degree - Demy places fire-engine red objects in many frames - but the skin-tones seem unfortunate, with Lockwood looking sunburnt rather than tanned throughout.
your review of 'Model Shop' is in at least one extent reassuring for me, zedz, in that I was already considering, at the very least, postponing purchase of this box-set, at least until the price drops somewhat.

Although I'm a huge fan of the director I already have DVDs of what are generally considered all of his best films: 'Lola'; 'Baie Des Anges'; 'Demoiselles...'; 'Parapluies',....and even 'Donkey'
Equally I'm aware that even at various points he skirts dangerously close to tweeness and being deluged by saccharine, so any investment' in other films could perhaps only best be justified by 'completeness' or the possibility of discovering some underappreciated gems.

'Model Shop' was one film which I have long been keen on buying, perhaps on the basis that it may prove to be as perceptive an outsider's view of (an aspect of) America as Malle's 'Atlantic City', or even Antonioni's 'Zabriskie Point'.

Evidently not.

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zedz
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#86 Post by zedz » Thu Nov 27, 2008 10:42 pm

Another one down: The Pied Piper

I wasn't holding out much hope for this film, since I'm no great fan of Peau d'ane, but I was very pleasantly surprised. It's quite different from the arch Cocteau pastiche of the previous film (which is, for me, immediately sunk by the Cocteau comparison).

It's a really interesting kid's film, perhaps most interesting for remaining steadfastly a kid's film despite all the other colours Demy brings to it. They make it an extraordinarily dark kid's film, even darker than its literary antecedents, which are hardly sentimental, and it's amazingly, explicitly cynical about religion. This particular aspect made me realise just how much pallid piety is routinely shovelled into films for children. Demy, however, climaxes his little fantasy with
SpoilerShow
the gleeful, appalling incineration of a Jew - the Holocaust associations aren't overplayed, but they're hard to avoid.
The English cast embodies their characters as types - this is one of the aspects of the film that clearly aims it at children: it's refreshingly free of knowing winks at a secondary adult audience - and the film has the rich dark colours of a well-preserved tapestry. Many scenes are presented as complex, luxuriously tracked sequence shots, seemingly indebted to Ophuls. A very nice transfer.

When I was talking about original versions above, I was misled by the way this film was described on the packaging. Although the disc provides both English and French audio tracks (and French subtitles for the English version), English is unambiguously the version originale.

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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#87 Post by Dylan » Sat Nov 29, 2008 9:38 pm

Any screengrabs online? I would especially love to see some images from Model Shop.

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zedz
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#88 Post by zedz » Wed Dec 03, 2008 7:27 pm

Two more down.

L'evenement le plus important depuis que. . . - Well it's telling that I lose interest before I even finish writing the title. This film has possibly the cheesiest title sequence I've ever seen. It looks like it belongs with a lame mid-70s sitcom. Which turns out to be completely appropriate.

Marcello Mastroianni stars as the world's first pregnant man. Hilarity ensues. Or not, depending on how intrinsically hilarious you find the sight of Marcello with a prosthetic tummy, because that's it, folks.

Demy's decision to play this comparatively straight - everybody simply accepts that now, in the 'modern world' (cue extremely feeble satire), men can get pregnant - is the most interesting decision in the film, but it renders the goings on listless and bland. Mastroianni and Deneuve are sort of charming, but it's all doomed from the start. It aspires to 30s screwball, but it's actually like an unfunny 70s sitcom stripped of its laughtrack and played at half-speed. For completists only.

Decent transfer, but the only English option is a dub, which is particularly egregious at servicing Mastroianni, who gets a ridiculous semi-Noo Yoik accent that lapses into an ersatz Italian accent only when the character's Italianness is mentioned. Deneuve's relatively colourless performance is blanded out further by stapling on a perky TV housewife voice.

La naissance du jour - Much more satisfying. A smart adaptation of Colette, gentle and relaxed, dominated by multiple layers of narration (Colette on the soundtrack and in person, sometimes interrupting herself as the 'voice' shifts on- and off-screen; her mother's letters).

It's the most Varda-esque film of Demy's that I've seen, reflective and intimate, with associative camera movements and montage reflecting the character's flitting consciousness. The film's observational, impressionistic visual style (rather than the dramatic, presentational style of much of Demy's work) and playful structure seem to me much closer to Varda's films.

Although the film is predicated on heterosexual romance, there's some blatant directorial ogling of the male lead going on, particularly in the scenes in which Vial is parading around in only a pair of extrordinarily tight and revealing (and anachronistic?)swimming trunks (which makes it quite unbelievable that Colette doesn't realise his true feelings for her - are you blind, woman?).

It's an OK transfer, given its source as a TV film shot on 16mm, though there are a couple of brief damaged sections (tramlines and missing frames).

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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#89 Post by Perkins Cobb » Thu Dec 04, 2008 1:47 pm

Well, the US DVD of A Slightly Pregnant Man has the French language track + English subtitles, so if you're really a completist, there's that option.

What do you guys think, will I ever be able to acquire copies of just the films in this set that I haven't already seen on their US DVDs? Because I'm not a Demy fan particularly, but I'd like to see the rarities once, especially Model Shop.

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zedz
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#90 Post by zedz » Sun Dec 14, 2008 10:41 pm

Two more down, neither of which I had high hopes for, but I was pleasantly surprised in both cases.

Lady Oscar - A very strange film: a French subject, adapted from a Japanese manga, made in English with Japanese money. Even stranger is imagining who its target audience could have been. Initially it seems to be pitched at ten-year-old girls - a shallow, rollicking romantic adventure - but there's bad language, exposed breasts and it's all steeped in remarkably perverse gender politics.

The manga influence gives the film very flat characterizations and a cute but limiting breathlessness to its exposition, but the real interest for me lies in the gender play. Lady Oscar is a girl who has been raised as a boy so that she can succeed her father as the Queen's guard (the queen in question is Marie Antionette). As played, the drag is extremely unconvincing, but it seems to deceive people. Except that we soon realise it doesn't: Marie A and her friends know she's a she, and so do most of the other women at court - she's even sparked a fashion for masculine dress. (The original comic strip was apparently inspired by the real life Chevalier d'Eon, but it doesn't have an ounce of the ingrained oddness of his/her story.) The men, however, seem unable to penetrate the disguise, even when they're "oddly attracted" to the fey young soldier. Her 'brotherly' bond to groom Andre, with whom she was raised, blossoms into true love on cue. So far, so fairy tale, but Demy uses those role-playing conventions to take the film into some rather challenging areas.

As the film progresses, the charade seems to slip away - a new group of soldiers refuse to obey their boss because he's obviously a girl, for example - and by the time 'Lady Oscar' comes to be married off to a wicked baron, her true gender is common knowledge. And this is where Demy delivers his coup de grace. The Baron's interest in Oscar, it seems, is as much because of her masculine pose and despite it, and he indicates that what he's really interested in is a three-way with Andre as well. Her retaliation is to do a Marlene: turn up for the engagement party in man-drag, aggressively dance with a fetching maiden (a newcomer who seems to be the only person present unaware that Oscar's a woman) and conclude with a full-on kiss. In such comparatively decorative surroundings, the scene carries a real punch.

Otherwise, it's memorably lush, with Demy making the most of his opportunity to film at Versailles. However lightweight the story is, the film is consistently gorgeous to look at and the transfer is very good.

Parking - This film has so many things going against it you feel like it ought to give up the fight halfway through.
1) It's an update of Orpheus, and not just of the myth, but of Cocteau's Orpheus, against which it's hopelessly outmatched (and Jean Marais is on hand to rub it in).
2) In this version, Orpheus is a rock star.
3) And Eurydice is an avant-garde sculptor.
4) It's a wall-to-wall fashion crime scene, with Orphee wearing a red headband throughout.
5) When he's 'rocking out' on stage the headband flashes with LED's.
6) The special effects are atrocious (Charon's eyes glow red - spooky!)
7) It's a musical, but the music is abominable French 80s pop.
8) It's topical! (The John Lennon references boomerang almost as disastrously as the Cocteau ones.)

But despite all this, I think I'm with Barmy on this: I sort of loved it. The very '80s vision of Hell as a black, white and acid red transitional space (part warehouse, part abandoned downtown, part airport security post) is pretty indelible. And there is one half-decent song (about which more in a moment).

And, once again, Demy's interest in unusual sexual politics manages to make this film unlike anything else of its time. Orphee, you see, is unabashedly bisexual, living in a menage a trois / quatre with his beloved wife and his beloved boyfriend, Calais (fourth wheel Aristee, who evidently just likes to watch, is the cutest of the bunch), and the film's big romantic number is a 'Triad'-like ballad about not wanting to have to choose between his male and female lover. What's really remarkable about this aspect of the film is that the tangled erotic relationships are never presented as problematic: Orphee's male lover is never presented as a threat to his marital love, and the tragedy of his loss of Eurydice is in no way 'discounted' by the relationship that survives. This would be a bold enough attitude to take in a new film, but it's amazing to see it in one more than 20 years old. Presumably this would have been the most personal aspect of the film for Demy, and it's certainly the one that burns most passionately from the screen.
Last edited by zedz on Mon Dec 15, 2008 10:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#91 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Dec 15, 2008 11:49 am

I should admit some curiosity about Lady Oscar since the lead, Catriona McColl, went on to star in Lucio Fulci's most bizarre films City Of The Living Dead, The House By The Cemetery and of course The Beyond.

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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#92 Post by whaleallright » Mon Dec 15, 2008 7:54 pm

I'm wondering what people think of UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE. I saw this years ago and thought pretty highly of it, but my memories are growing dim. The film has been very hard to see, until now I suppose.

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zedz
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#93 Post by zedz » Tue Dec 16, 2008 4:58 pm

jonah.77 wrote:I'm wondering what people think of UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE. I saw this years ago and thought pretty highly of it, but my memories are growing dim. The film has been very hard to see, until now I suppose.
Watched this last night, and it struck me as the most successful of the post-Rochefort films. It's very much of a piece with Demoiselles and Umbrellas (and was originally conceived as another Deneuve vehicle, one that brought the cycle back to Nantes), though it represents yet another approach to the 'problem' of the musical. The film is structured and written as a non-musical (no 'numbers' as such), but every scene is set to continuous music and all of the dialogue is sung.

I must say that in my opinion the music is the film's weak point. It's inoffensive, but the deliberate refusal to resolve into song structures turns it into a bit of a recitative-a-thon, and there are only a couple of musically memorable passages (notably the big choral confrontations in the streets). It's sometimes described as an opera rather than a musical, but that doesn't seem quite right to me either - it's a sung melodrama.

On the plus side, there's characteristic Demy decor and colour (notably a deep red parlour that alludes to the one in Le bel indifferent) and interesting experiments with tone. If this isn't the darkest musical ever made, it's not for lack of trying.

With one film left to go, it's now hard to see one Demy film without seeing all the others peeping through it (guess which arcade features in Une chambre en ville?). As a director he really laboured to tie his oeuvre together, and it resolves into several interwoven strands:

The Experimental Musicals (films that play in different ways with the classical Hollywood musical form):
Primarily Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort and Une Chambre en ville, but also Lola (a musical without the music) and Parking. And then there are the films with songs that aren't really musicals (Peau d'ane, The Pied Piper).

The 'Lola' Universe:
Lola, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Model Shop

The Cocteau films:
Le Bel Indifferent, Peau d'Ane, Parking

The (Facile) Gender-Play Films:
L'evennement le plus important. . ., Lady Oscar, Parking

The Children's Films:
Peau d'ane, The Pied Piper, Lady Oscar

Several films fall into more than one category, but there are only a couple that don't fall into any of them: Baie des anges and La Naissance du jour. But the former at least is quintessential Demy.

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zedz
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#94 Post by zedz » Sun Dec 21, 2008 4:13 am

Final film down: 3 places pour le 26

It's one last musical, and probably Demy's most classical one along with Les Demoilselles de Rochefort. Like that film, it contains specific references to the MGM model, with The Band Wagon as convenient referent. In this case, the aging musical comedy star is Yves Montand (was this really his first musical?) and the young co-star is Mathilda May, though the complications are rather more melodramatic.

It's all rather frothy, but very sweet. The colour-coordinated decor is prime Demy and the camera often takes on the lyrical mobility of his best work. There's a lovely soundcheck scene where Montand sings unaccompanied and echoing while the camera drifts through the void of the empty theatre.

Song-wise, Legrand fares much much better than he did with Parking, although almost every song is saddled with a grotesquely unsympathetic late-80s arrangement (sequencers and cheap drum machines) that's hard to forgive. Surely Montand himself wasn't recording in that mode at the time (or did he really undergo the 1980s equivalent of 'Electric Mud'?)

Having made my way through all of the films now, Demy's 1980s now seem a much more rewarding period than his 1970s. Any one of La Naissance de la jour, Un Chambre en ville, Parking and 3 places pour le 26 (hell, I'll even throw in La table tournante!) is a more rewarding watch than the four 70s films or Model Shop, though by the same token none of them match any of those first four features. It makes for a very neatly stratified career, at least.

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domino harvey
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#95 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jan 21, 2009 12:02 am

I thought I'd asked this already but I guess I didn't-- what's the best place to go to for ordering this set?

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#96 Post by zedz » Wed Jan 21, 2009 5:09 pm

I went straight through Cine-Tamaris (keeping it in the family): http://www.cine-tamaris.com/article.php?id=3962

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domino harvey
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#97 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jan 21, 2009 5:44 pm

For me in America it ended up costing about thirty euros less to order via Amazon. Thanks though!

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Gregory
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 4:07 pm

Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#98 Post by Gregory » Thu May 07, 2009 1:48 pm

I'm getting around to purchasing this now, or at least I hope to buy it soon. It's currently € 100 at both Ciné-Tamaris (€29 shipping pretty much rules that out) and Amazon.fr. Has anyone noted whether this set ever fluctuates in price at Amazon?

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domino harvey
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Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#99 Post by domino harvey » Thu May 07, 2009 2:02 pm

I've never seen prices budge on Amazon.fr, I suspect there's some sort of reason why but whatever the price is now is probably stable

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Knappen
Joined: Wed Jul 12, 2006 2:14 am
Location: Oslo/Paris

Re: Jacques Demy on DVD

#100 Post by Knappen » Mon Nov 23, 2009 4:46 pm

The Pied Piper - the ultimate edition (photographed by me during a spending raid at Gibert Joseph today).

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