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Life of dance and dance of life, Friday morning to Monday noon. "I've tried to recreate a musical atmosphere." Fête de la mer, a coastal town abuzz with preparations, saltimbanques in trucks advertising Honda and Shell. West Side Story is taken account of via George Chakiris and Grover Dale as a pair of hoofing carnies, meanwhile twin gazelles (Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac) don chapeaus ornate like wedding cakes to declare their yen for "la ritournelle, les calembours et les bons mots." Maman (Danielle Darrieux) runs a bistro at the town square and regales customers with remembrances of romances past, the jilted beau she thinks is far away actually owns the music shop around the corner, a disconcertingly earnest Michel Piccoli. Chance meetings and missed connections, melodic motifs leaking into one another and the camera gliding like a wandering Cupid, the supreme exaltation and tristesse of Jacques Demy. "My only love, but what good is a dream?" The sisters long for the big city, the blonde has a prétentieux boyfriend who fires a Daliesque pistol at canvases, in his abstract art gallery is the portrait painted by the yearning sailor (Jacques Perrin). A piano concerto is the brunette's passion, she scatters the sheet music and who helps her pick it up but Gene Kelly, his grin older yet unfaded. "Mon idéal féminin," the face on the verge of recognition or the song one can't quite place. Military forces on the streets and axe murderers in the news and still a burst of euphoria sustained from first to last, its quadrille of lovers and almost-lovers like the daisy-chain of revelers scampering across the teeming fair. Les Enfants du Paradis, On the Town, An American in Paris, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes... Happy ending after happy ending after happy ending, "quelle folie," Demy wouldn't want it any other way. Cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet. With Jacques Riberolles, Geneviève Thénier, and Henri Crémieux.
--- Fernando F. Croce |