This week’s Performing Arts Pick is “The Essential Jacques Demy,” a staggering new DVD box set containing the bulk of the French director’s output over a 30-year career, including his work with legendary actresses Anouk Aimee, Jeanne Moreau, and Catherine Deneuve.
A career-spanning collection like this can be just as fascinating for what it omits as for what it includes. On the one hand, watching the New Wave touchstone “Lola,” Demy’s first feature length film, alongside the candy-colored, Deneuve-starring musicals “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort” is enough to demonstrate that he was a much more versatile director than many would have thought. On the other, the collection pushes a fairly conservative narrative about Demy’s career and leaves out true oddities such as “Model Shop,” his first film in English (and prominently featured in the last season of “Mad Men”), and the bizarre comedy “A Slightly Pregnant Man.” Look a little deeper than what is here, and you’ll find that Demy’s career was much weirder and more interesting than you ever realized.
“Bay of Angels” was the big surprise for me, a character study that is in many ways unlike anything else he made and that had somehow escaped me. Moreau stars as Jackie, an icy platinum blonde who joins an eager banker for a journey through the casinos of the Riviera. Despite its seaside setting it’s maybe the smallest-scale film Demy ever made, essentially a character study that is almost claustrophobic in its focus on the couple.
The other surprise in the collection is the little-seen “The World of Jacques Demy.” The 1995 documentary made by Demy’s wife Agnes Varda (a filmmaker of even more renown than Demy) is one of her best works and one of the most moving portraits of a filmmaker that has ever been made.
The beguiling fantasy “Donkey Skin” and the late-career working-class musical “Une Chambre en Ville,” one of the more underappreciated films in Demy’s oeuvre, round out the box set, along with a smattering of special features including archival interviews and visual essays.
