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Jacques Demy's roundabout road back to France, out of Japanese anime and peopled with British thesps. The ancien régime from 1755 to the storming of the Bastille, political turmoil to match the sexual upheavals of a woman raised as a boy and parachuted into Versailles. The little girl is named Oscar and made captain of the guards, the gentle jest has the androgyny of the original source transformed into Catriona MacColl in a blue military coat, "kind sir" to you. The court is a jumbo parlor of cotton-candy perukes, frilly brocades and gold-lined doorways, Marie Antoinette (Christine Böhm) is a fuzzy chiclet lent the glow of romance during a rendezvous with a Swedish suitor. (The illicit couple is privileged with the sole source of light in a chamber as the camera goes into an enraptured swirl.) Shelagh McLeod completes the trio of female daring as the young seamstress on a vengeful mission—three women on their "own quiet battles." A willowy rebuke of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, done in the style of Fragonard and founded on the blur-zones of reality and fantasy, submission and revolt, masculinity and femininity. Smack in the middle is the heroine, following a tavern brawl with topless lounging in bed and struggling to keep a soldierly bearing while contemplating love. "There was a man once who made me feel very strange... and confused." That man (Barry Stokes) is the childhood friend turned dissident and the Demy dreamer who voices the Demy melancholia: "We can't turn back the clock." Shy of Borzage, what other filmmaker would rate the Revolution according to how it can separate or unite lovers? With Jonas Bergström, Mark Kingston, Sue Lloyd, Terence Budd, and Patsy Kensit.
--- Fernando F. Croce |