The Musical Universe of Jacques Demy

The growing exposure to French New Wave films must have probably built a trivial scope about the films and their directors. We know Resnais likes to play with time and memory, Varda likes to examine characters, and we will soon also see Marker’s obsession with pictures, Godard’s deconstruction of morality, and Rivette’s drive for experimentation in plotlines. While the characters take the stage themselves, we also begin to accustom ourselves to the director’s recurring framework for their films. This mild examination drives us towards a theory popularized by French filmmakers called the Auteur Theory. It briefly states that the film director is the ‘author’ of the film, and uses the medium as a means of their own artistic expression.
In consideration of the director as an ‘author’, we can begin to appreciate Jacques Demy’s filmography better. Demy’s films combine to build the fabric of a cinematic universe of his own making. Here the characters travel from one narrative dimension to another, interacting and disturbing the plot from the narrative history of Demy’s older films in the universe. Starting with a characteristically French New Wave film Lola, which is supposedly seen as a ‘musical without music’, we begin to see Demy’s personal conviction with the laissez-faire romanticism musical cinema offered to him. His most beloved work, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg began to crystallize his passionate aspirations of fusing a romantic musical against a political backdrop (of French’s war with Algeria). Demy’s dissolution of cinematic realism ironically comes very close to a realistic purview of love, heartbreaks, intense emotions, displacement through war, and the synthesis of a new life from an old one. The vibrant mise-en-scene with energetic colours, while also carrying a ‘pink tinted melancholia’, an operatic masterpiece composed by the legendary Michel Legrand, and a young romantic love story come together to give us a timeless musical.
Carrying his success, Demy made Bay of Angels, which is about a man struggling with a gambling problem, while we begin to see Demy’s intentions of constructing a passion-driven love story amidst political or social turmoil in A Room in Town. More importantly, we also notice Demy’s treatment of time in his own fictional universe. We engage with glimpses in generational shifts, morphing of a cityscape or a ruralscape, and we see episodic transitions in the lives of the characters we have been acquainted with his further releases.
Although Demy's influences can be more closely associated with Hollywood than with the 'formal radicalism' the French New Wave is known for, the complex depth of his films demands to stand out.