Jacquot de Nantes

This film, Agnes Varda's loving tribute to both Jacques Demy and to the playful joy of cinema, is a great idea executed with a beguiling sincerity and containing some wonderful moments that make up for it's flaws and that make the film very worth seeing.

Concentrating on Demy's childhood in working class France of the 1940's, the film often doesn't quite go far enough into absorbing us into it's world. It can be sketchy at times. Just about all of the characters other than the young Demy are blurry and weak. The details of the time and place are often sparse in a way that distances. When World War II begins, we would hardly know it if not for a few minor mentions of it as well as a brief, unconvincing moment involving a German soldier wandering his way into the scene of a family gathering. We don't quite get a vivid enough impression of where Demy comes from.

However, all of this doesn't matter during the wonderfully funny, charming scenes of the young Jacques making his first films. The scenes of his working on a stop-motion animated film set in a cardboard city he builds in his basement are particularly witty and fun to watch.

The film also contains some most valuable footage of Demy himself reflecting on the past and, to sometimes charming effect, the film intersperses several clips from his films (The Pied Piper, Lola, Umbrellas of Cherbourg) throughout, highlighting the influence of childhood memories on his later work.

Jacquot is recommended. It makes you want to see again (or see for the first time) the films of Jacques Demy and most anyone who has had their life taken over by cinema will be able to pick out the most innocent, inspiring parts of themselves out of the film's better moments.

Director Agnés Varda gives a loving picture of her husband Jacques Demy's teens in rural Nantes. Little Jacques (or Jacquot) grows up obsessed with his interest in movies and the idea of making his own.

As just a little boy he makes his own animated stories. Now and then his childhood adventures turns into a movie, and instead we see small scenes from his later classic movies; Lola, The Young Girls Of Rochefort and others. For example at one scene at his fathers garage when a customers picks up his car : suddenly we see a scene with a garage from "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg", with the same dialogue.

Jacques Demy and Agnes Varda made the movie together. He provided with stories from his childhood, and she wrote the manuscript. It is a very beautiful little film about childhood and about a little kid obsessed with his movies.

Agnes Varda's biographical sketch of Jacques Demy's childhood and how it shaped him into a filmmaker. I use the word "sketch" because the film doesn't really go in-depth to any degree and it feels like a pretty superficial treatment. However, there's a lot of warmth and charm to it, and the anecdotes being revealed make for compelling material. If the sort of nostalgia on display isn't terribly original, at least there is some originality in the structure, tying clips from Demy's work to specific moments to his youth. The brief scenes of the real Demy (presumably not long before his death) help keeps things fresh as well. While this didn't knock my socks off, it was a very pleasant and endearing movie.

My second Varda's entry (after CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 1962, 7/10) is her cinematic eulogy to her late husband, the filmmaker Jacques Demy (1931-1990) after 28 years of marriage, who passed away one year before the film's release, recounts Demy's life from childhood to adolescence in Nantes, re-enacts mostly sketchy episodes of that time from Demy's memoir, particularly during the Occupied France in WWII and Jacquot (Jacques' nickname) 's ever-growing passion towards cinema.

Named after his paternal grandfather, it is unexpectedly poignant when a young Jacques (played by Maron, Joubeau and Monnier in different ages) is bringing to visit his grandpa's grave and see his own name on the tombstone, as if the reincarnation just completes another circle. Demy's father Raymond (Dublet) is a mechanic and his mother Marilou (De Villepoix) is a coiffeuse, they own a garage and he has a younger brother Yvon (Delaroche, Averty in different ages). Most of the narrative is conveyed with unaffected naturalism by its cast under a blanched monochrome, with whimsical coloured-shots materialise irregularly and presumably function as indicators which influence Demy's life afterwards, like Theatre Guignol.

Varda's essayist construal of the biographical texts largely restores Jacquot's early years in a lifelike form, as a documentary made in 1930-40s, details mostly convivial vignettes with references in Demy's own distinguished oeuvre - in my case I only watched DONKEY SKIN (1970, 4/10) and THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964, 7/10) - introduced and bookended by opposite pointing fingers respectively, and underlined with a miscellany of Demy's favourite classical music.

From a carefree child who enjoys marionette show, to a bit older in the Occupation period, becomes repulsive towards the war, then in the latter half, the film's focus shifts to the zealousness of cinema, not only a frequent spectator, the young Jacquot self-studies rudimentary knowledge of cinematography, makes his own live-action and animation shorts with a hand-hold camera bartered from an antique shop, and plays them at home on an ersatz screen set in the closet. Destiny has been kind to him, a chief struggle is his working-class father's initial disagreement of Demy's decision to throw himself into the movie business, but when he realises his son does have the talent, he is sensible enough to let him go to Paris, where the film eventually draws to a close.

JACQUOT DE NANTES is Varda's personal but endearing portrayal of her beloved husband, a farewell visual memoir of him, there are brief documentaries of an ailing Demy talking feebly in his last days, and near-end, the macro close-ups of his wrinkles, grey stubble and finally zoom in on his nebulous eyes, like a valedictory gaze during the final stage of a sacred catharsis to let him go, the film itself stands as a testimony of their ever-lasting love, poetically and romantically, it evokes great intimacy towards those we love and cherishes the time when we are together.

Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy were two well-known French directors who both pushed boundaries and consistently put out personal, stylistic films. They also happened to be married for about 30 years.

In 1990, Demy was tragically dying from HIV/AIDS. This film appears to have been made at least in part right before his death, as it features some documentary footage/interviews with him, but the bulk of the film isn't a documentary, and presents a somewhat fictionalised depiction of Demy's life as a boy, teenager, and then a young man. It aims to explore the important periods of his life that inspired his films, and serves as a love letter from a filmmaker wife to her filmmaker husband.

In telling a coming of age story about a young boy interested with making movies, this reminded me quite a bit of both Cinema Paradiso and the recent Steven Spielberg film The Fabelmans. I don't think it's quite as good as the latter, and it's definitely nowhere near as good as the former... but in the case of Cinema Paradiso, that honestly might just be the Ennio Morricone difference - his music sort of makes that film, and adds to the emotional impact of it all.

However, when considering the backstory behind Jacquot de Nantes, it becomes a good deal more touching and bittersweet, and at least some of that backstory is made clear in the text itself. It doesn't give you everything like a full-on documentary might, but you get enough context for things to be quite moving by the end. It's certainly a personal film and I can appreciate some of its emotional weight, but I think structurally and narratively, it can be kind of repetitive and even a little tedious in places.