F-0184

Title:

Jacquot de Nantes

Category:

S

Produced:

1991

Country:

France

Released:

Film: Jun 1993 (USA)
VHS: ?

Director:

Agnès Varda

Writer:

Jacques Demy (memoirs); Agnès Varda

Actors:

Philippe Maron (Jacquot 1); Edouard Joubeaud (Jacquot 2); Laurent Monnier (Jacquot 3); Brigitte De Villepoix (Marilou, la mere); Daniel Dublet (Raymond, le pere); Clément Delaroche (Yvon 1); Rody Averty (Yvon 2); Hélène Pors (Reine 1); Marie-Sidonie Benoist (Reine 2); Jérémie Bernard (Yannick 1); Cédric Michaud (Yannick 2); Julien Mitard (Rene 1); Jérémie Bader (Rene 2); Guillaume Navaud (Cousin Joel); Fanny Lebreton (La petite refugiee)

Description:

Jacquot Demy is a little boy at the end of the thirties. His father owns a garage and his mother is a hairdresser. The whole family lives happily and likes to sing and to go to the movies. Jacquot is fascinated by every kind of show (theatre, cinema, puppets). He buys a camera to shoot his first amateur film... An evocation of French cineast Jacques Demy's childhood and vocation for the cinema and the musicals. (Yepok)

Agnes Varda's 1991 tribute to her late husband, Jacques Demy--Varda's fellow pioneer in the French New Wave movement of the 1950s and early 1960s--is a moving combination of reenacted scenes from Demy's fanciful childhood, clips from his movies (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Donkey Skin), and filmed interviews with him shortly before he passed away. Varda's efforts lead to a touching and evocative portrait of a man who saw, even as a boy, no distinction between his imagination and the more magical traditions of theater and film. The cast of unknown actors portraying Demy and other people in reconstructions of his memories are very good, and the interesting tension between the function of these scenes as storytelling and their inclusion in Varda's larger biographical essay instantly recalls the intensely personal nature of Demy's own lush, ambitious experiments behind the camera. (Tom Keogh, Amazon.com)

Agnès Varda's film is a graceful, affecting tribute to her husband, the filmmaker Jacques Demy, who died (of leukemia, at age fifty-nine) in 1990. Documentary footage shows Demy in the last year of his life, reminiscing about his childhood and adolescence in the coastal town of Nantes. His liver-spotted hands caress the cheap cameras with which he shot his first movies-most of them crude but imaginative animated shorts with paper-cutout characters. Varda fleshes out her husband's memories with dramatized episodes from his early life, and uses clips from his mature films-"Lola" (1961) and "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964) are the best known-to demonstrate the relationship between the mundane experiences of his youth and the ravishing romantic art he created as an adult. The film's elegiac, reflective rhythm is seductive and very moving. Varda conveys the joy of young Jacques's learning, with primitive means, to tell stories on film, and gives us evidence, too, of how fully the movies we know him by expressed his dreamy, passionate nature. This picture celebrates its subject by treating Demy's biography as an instance of a rare continuity between life and movie art-as a miraculous, ephemeral convergence, like "Lola." In French. (Terrence Rafferty, Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker)

Language:

French

TT:

118 min (USA)

J.S. Bach's Music:

Que ma joie
Jean-Charles Giraud (piano)

Format:

Film: Black and White / Color
VHS: (PAL)

Company:

Film: Canal; Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC); Ciné Tamaris; La Sept Cinéma; Sofiarp
VHS: ?

Comments:

Watch selections:

Buy movie at:

VHS: Amazon.com [PAL]

Source/Links: IMDB
Contributor: Aryeh Oron (November 2007)