The Essential Jacques Demy

For better or worse, when we think about movie musicals, we think about English-language ones. We trace the history from Busby Berkely and Ernst Lubitsch through Stanley Donen and Vincente Minelli, onto Bob Fosse, and then into the present day. That surely leaves out many masters of the form - like Jacques Demy. Here comes Criterion to the rescue with "The Essential Jacques Demy," a box set that collects six of his best films, four shorts, three feature-length documentaries (about Demy, though not directed by him,) and innumerable other pieces of miscellaneous footage profiling the man. It's a collection of the work essential to his makeup as an artist, but it's also a collection that proves that Demy, himself, was essential - one of the great directors not just in his chosen genre, but of his entire era.

The shorts included here - such as one effort about a widely celebrated priest, and another depicting a week in the life of a clog maker - don't have the musical verve that drives most of Demy's feature films. They do display an artist, though, who even early in his career had a preternatural knack for visual rhythm and lyricism. The rest of the extras - there are interviews with actors and with Demy on discs for each of the six films, totaling many hours when put together, as well as a beautiful visual biographical essay entitled "Jacques Demy: A to Z" - give a deep insight into that artist himself, from his personal life (his marriage to fellow filmmaker Agnes Varda, his bisexuality, his unshakeable rapport with other filmmakers,) to his working methods. Like the rest of this box set, they're essential viewing.

That brings us to the films themselves. Jacques Demy came up in the French New Wave, which prized experimental manners of making narrative films, and scripts that spoke to the problems of the French middle- and lower-classes. His first two films in this set - the only two that aren't musicals - fit right into those hallmarks. First up is his debut, "Lola," which watches with great sympathy the romantic ups and downs experienced by a number of people in Nantes. We have a showgirl, her child, a sailor, a young friend he meets on the street, and more; all socializing under soft, sunny lights. There's a striking carnival sequence here - full of flashing bulbs and slow-motion - whose influence we probably still feel today, in the filmmaking of artists like Wes Anderson. An extra reveals that "Lola" was originally intended to be a musical, but the loss of song-and-dance doesn't hurt it one bit - the seeming build to musical numbers that never actually arrive give this film a singular tone.

Demy followed that up with the other black-and-white film included on this set, "Bay of Angels." It's not a musical, but it gives important insight into the depiction of relationships within his musicals. Jeanne Moreau stars as a gambling addict who picks up a man for the weekend after he proves good luck. They swoon for each other, lose interest, chase after others, begin to miss each other, and come back together - miserable, but together - before the end of the film. It's an entire relationship in a weekend, distilled to 90 minutes - and it's an encapsulation of the bittersweet tone Demy would take toward coupling in the rest of the four films here.

The third film in the set, "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," remains the one for which Demy is remembered. A melding of the movie-musical and the opera (every single line of dialogue in the film is sung, not spoken) that remains formally unprecedented to this day, "Cherbourg" is a three-act tragedy detailing first love, its dissolution, and its eventual - tragic - catharsis. Catherine Deneuve stars as a young woman deeply in love, until her boyfriend is called off to war. The second act details her time spent alone while he's gone, leading to her marriage to another man. The third act is the kicker - a snow swept depiction of the two's reunion, after they've both found new romantic partners. The word "heartbreaking" is overused to the point of meaninglessness, but Demy's vision of love as something that shapes us, but never actually lasts, is nothing if not that.

"The Young Girls of Rochefort" is occasionally held up as a companion piece to "Cherbourg," but it's its own - much more delightful - being. Another Deneuve-starring musical, this one's done in the old-school MGM manner: widescreen compositions, popping colors, song-and-dance numbers interrupted by sweetly sanitized romantic banter, and yes, even Gene Kelly. Demy's camera follows many denizens of the titular town - even an axe murderer, whom Demy's eyes sees under rose-colored glasses, because that's how musicals work - as they flirt with each other, and narrowly miss cementing their romantic entanglements into actual relationships. It's a truly wonderful film, well-deserving of its reputation as a crowd-pleaser. (A retrospective documentary from Agnes Varda, "The Young Girls at 25," is included here and fully details the influence the film has had on both audiences and fellow artists.)

"Donkey Skin" does not feel like an atypical Demy film - it has popping colors, musical sequences, and Catherine Deneuve, so it fits right into the oeuvre - but it may be the most idiosyncratic film in a box set full of them. An adaptation of an apparently well-known fairytale, the narrative sees Deneuve's princess run away after her widowed father decides he should be marrying her (because his daughter is the only woman as attractive as his now-dead wife.) She ends up working in a pig trough, her beauty masked by the titular donkey carcass, until her Prince Charming falls for her. Demy renders the entire scenario with complete sincerity, reveling in the majesty of oversized dresses, in the opulent set design, and in the slightly surreal imagery. This is what Disney movies like "The Little Mermaid" would look like, if they were live action and didn't soften up the source material from which they originate.

All these concerns coalesce in "The World of Jacques Demy", the other documentary from Varda included on the box set. That one goes through Demy's career, film-by-film, investigating the way that his movies interact with each other (many characters cross over from one to another.) You realize that's what this box set gives us - not just the "essential" works of a great musical filmmaker, but an entire world he created. Fairy tales, operas, MGM-style song-and-dance films; Demy filtered his personality through as many lyrical forms as possible.

The final film included here, though not the last film that Demy made, is "Une Chambre En Ville". Like "Cherbourg," this is another musical-opera hybrid, with every single word of dialogue sung. The film depicts love affairs framed in front of a small-town worker's strike; yet another Demy depiction of lean, unfortunate times alleviated by the joy of music, of bright colors, and of filmmaking. It may not be his greatest film, but it helps further reveal to us Demy's worldview, encapsulated by his work as a director: that real life is just like the movies, full of wonder and excitement and pleasures, only there's a lot more suffering. His movies put the suffering back into the equation.

Hollywood musicals sand the edges off, but Demy showed us that you could be joyous and jagged at the same time. The movies approach that conflict in different ways - "Cherbourg" faces tragedy head-on, "Rochefort" knowingly marginalizes it, etc. - but the pains of real life were never far away from his intensely stylized frames. He gave us an entire creative world, full of both highs and lows. And Criterion, in giving that world to us via this box set, has crafted one of the highlights of the cinematic year.

"The Essential Jacques Demy"
Dual-Format Box Set (6 Blu-rays, 7 DVDs)
Criterion.com
$124.95