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"I'm crying my eyes out." "It's that damned tear gas." The collision of striking workers and police troops is a valiant stab at seizing tuneful Gallic barricades back from Andrew Lloyd Webber, before that the demolished Pont transbordeur de Nantes is poignantly resurrected under a sun that grows red behind the titles. Among the picketers is the shipyard laborer (Richard Berry), "a real country boy" who's lost interest in his saccharine girlfriend (Fabienne Guyon). La Baronne (Danielle Darrieux), the fellow's landlady and widow of a certain Colonel Langlois, driven to sloshed rebukes of her own bourgeois surroundings. Her daughter (Dominique Sanda) prowls the streets bare under a fur coat in defiance of her possessive husband (Michel Piccoli), the fortune teller envisions "un métallurgiste" in her future. Jacques Demy back in Lola town, "a past I thought was forgotten," beautifully fulfilling Godard's review of The Pajama Game ("the first left-wing operetta"). Moony romanticism is largely a memory, the soulful young dreamboat of earlier musicals has become a hangdog thirtysomething and the fair ingénue sports burn scars. Yet the ardor remains, deepened by pain, ringed by fear. (The fortuitous couple in the motel room are aware of the fragility of their embrace, "afraid you were just a dream.") The emotive latticework of wallpaper, the green pallor of a television store studded with flickering screens and the abrupt red splash of a bloody razor. A chanson commenting on its own form, "gai et triste," the pure Demy distillate of rapture and tragedy. Between protest and procession before the Cathédrale, clubbed skull and perforated heart for the farewell tableau. "Words seem too empty to express such powerful feelings." The proximity to Coppola (One from the Heart) is serendipitous and salutary. Cinematography by Jean Penzer. With Jean-François Stévenin, Anna Gaylor, Marie-France Roussel, Jean-Louis Rolland, and Georges Blaness.
--- Fernando F. Croce |