Les Demoiselles de Rochefort directed by Jacques Demy
Hélène Jeanbrau/Ciné Tamaris
Jacques Demy’s 1967 musical is sheer nonsense. Enjoyable nonsense, undoubtedly, but nonsense through and through. Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac, sisters in real life, play twins here. Delphine Garnier teaches ballet while Solange composes concerti at her piano. Each dreams of Paris, and meeting her dream man. We get to know them and their circle, inhabitants of Rochefort each with his or her sad story – until a fair comes to town and, with a romantic sailor and Gene Kelly thrown in, magical sparkly fate makes everything right for all.
This 1996 restored version has all Demy’s chocolate-box colours, and at times the clothes look fabulous. An unashamedly superficial film - a sort of hommage to Hollywood musicals – it’s also a study in ironic chic. Some of the director’s mannerisms are attractive (the sisters are at times photographed straight to camera) but I think a lack of visual sense mars the experience: a lot of effort goes into costumes but little, apparently, to screen composition - a major flaw particularly in some of the dance sequences. Why have Gene Kelly dance, then show only his top half? It happens too much in Les Demoiselles: the dance sequences are fun, but not well filmed. Compare the famous dance from Singin' in the Rain - in which Kelly's whole body is kept within shot except when his feet are still and the camera focuses on his face for special effect, and in which every cut is timed to match the musical phrasing - with this dance sequence with Françoise Dorléac in which his feet are often cut off and there's at least one unhappy cut across the music. And compare the start of West Side Story, where the camera does not cut into the dancers' bodies except to make striking compositions - freeze-frame at 1 minute 8 seconds and again at 3.40 to see what I mean - with this effort from Les Demoiselles which ends decently but starts with our being unable to see much of the dancers at all. I'm afraid that where Stanley Donen, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise knew what they were doing, Jacques Demy didn't really seem to.
Why Solange falls for the empty Andy, I don’t know. Monsieur Dame would be a better bet, you sense, but Solange’s mother gets her hands on him. Delphine’s happy ending is an absurd anticlimax. There is a dark subplot, with a woman being murdered and hacked to pieces, and at times you wonder if the whole pastel surface must obscure a strange, dark anti-musical. But I’m not sure Les Demoiselles is as good or clever a film as that.
By far the best thing in it is Michel Legrand’s music; particularly Solange’s concerto and the sisters’ signature song, Soeurs Jumelles. Otherwise, it’s a very silly film indeed.
It's on at the BFI until 27 August, then in October at the Gulbenkian Canterbury, the Riverside Studios Hammersmith and Watermans, Brentford. It's available on DVD too.
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