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The camera tilts down from a view of the port for the opening credits, the overhead angle turns a cobblestone street into a Seurat canvas on which open umbrellas glide like splashes of color. Pagnol is the basis, the boy (Nino Castelnuovo) works at a garage, the girl (Catherine Deneuve) helps Maman (Anne Vernon) run a failing shop. He's drafted off to Algiers and she waits, pregnant, their ultimate terror is not the pain of separation but the creeping awareness of a love that fades. "I would have died for him. Why aren't I dead?" Nothing but continuous rapture for Jacques Demy, nothing but sung dialogue and emotive pastels and exquisite aching—a melomaniac's laboratory experiment, a candy box that bleeds. Poe's tinted chambers, multiplied and exploded for an avalanche of scarlet and yellow, pink and turquoise. Black seeps in from the jeweler courting the heroine while the beau's away, not a heel but a fellow heartbroken drifter and, played by Marc Michel, a link to Lola. (Much more sinister is the white of a roomful of bridal veils.) "I don't like opera. Movies are better." A downpour of carnival confetti scarcely cheers up the maiden, whose tear-reddened eyes merely enhance Deneuve's overpowering prettiness. The soldier limps back and previously enchanted spaces become vacant or seedy, he settles for the caretaker (Ellen Farner) of his sickly aunt (Mireille Perrey). "C'est peut-être le bonheur qui me rend triste," the Demy lament echoed in a wartime letter, "it's strange how the sun and death travel together." (Michel Legrand deserves co-auteur status indeed with a score that gives even the word "merde" a captivating lilt.) Three movements ("Departure," "Absence," "Return"), with a coda that rolls Partie de Campagne into Splendor in the Grass and dissipates on a trenchant sign ("Cherbourgeoise"). Cinematography by Jean Rabier.
--- Fernando F. Croce |