“Donkey Skin” (1970)
Certainly one of the weirder fairy tales ever written, let alone filmed, Demy’s ”Donkey Skin” is an adaptation of Charles Perrault’s (of “Cinderella” fame) unnatural love folk fable Peau d’Âne. Incestuous and bizarre, the film’s oddness is adapted straight from the text, so perhaps Demy’s only faux pas is considering it for the screen: A King (Jean Marais) has everything, a beautiful wife (Catherine Deneuve), a magnificent castle, even a donkey that shits out gold (no, really!). But when his wife lies on her deathbed, he avows by her wishes to remarry to a woman who’s comparably beautiful. Disturbingly, after being disgusted by several homely but still queenly options, the King sets his sights on his own beautiful daughter, the Princess (also played by Deneuve). With the help of a mysterious fairy (Delphine Seyrig)—with whom the King has beef for an affair that didn’t pan out years earlier—the Princess tries to impede her father’s plans to marry her by placing impossible conditions in front of him in hopes that he’ll give up: for instance, he must have a wedding gown made from the colors of the weather, the moon and the sun. Each time, these fantastical provisos stump her father’s tailors, but only briefly. When the Princess has run out of delaying tactics, the fairy convinces the young girl to wear the Donkey Skin carcass—one of her earlier requests for a strange dress—and run away, essentially posing as a disgusting and disfigured young girl that no one could possibly want. Of course, a young prince eventually discovers the undisguised princess, becomes smitten, and through an elaborate glass slipper-esque technique, searches the kingdom high and low to find her. If one can get past the pungent and unsettling narrative elements—which to his credit Demy doesn’t try and soften— “Donkey Skin” is a whimsical and eccentrically tactile confection of color and of the most oddest rags to riches fables in cinema ever. By today’s standards there’s a lot of “WTF?”-ness going in “Donkey Skin,” but its ridiculous nature also makes for an amusingly captivating little bauble in the Demy oeuvre.
“Une Chambre en Ville” (1982)
‘Une Chambre’ stands out in this box set mostly because the Criterion Collection compilers skipped over three feature films and a made-for-tv movie and headed right for this late period work. Like ‘Cherbourg,’ every line of dialogue is sung, and yet this film feels rote. The complexity and verve that shone in so many of his previous works is absent. Demy never avoided melodrama, but it’s all a bit too dull and redolent of soap opera. There’s a subplot involving a workers’ strike that opens and closes the film, a tacked-on, Dickens-lite afterthought. Perhaps Demy was getting a little bored with this approach? “Une Chambre” is awfully workmanlike, which is unfortunate given his previous films (which are anything but). Even the music is lacking, as nearly every song repeats the same rhythm and melody over and over, sounding very much like “My Favorite Things” on valium. Demy worked with composer Michel Colombier (who went on to score some of “Purple Rain”) instead of his usual collaborator Michel Legrand, and the contrast does not favor Colombier. Though the film was nominated for nine César Awards, many of them in major categories, in hindsight this was equivalent to the Academy Awards bestowing a lifetime achievement to a once-great artist.
— With Rodrigo Perez
I hear ya` Jervaise, 53 years ago that bird was a true work of art, the bird was essentially total perfection.
I desperately want to perform literally every concievable and possible sex-act in the known universe on Catherine Deneuve (as the bird was in 1961 when the bird was 18, not as the bird is now obviously).
âThe Umbrellas of Cherbourgâ is one of my favorite movies. And among the very few I would venture to call 'perfect.'