| Once considered a minor figure of the French New Wave due to the so-called "apolitical" nature of his oeuvre compared to many of his peers, Jacques Demy is now indisputably a major figure in film history. Lola (1961), his full-length debut, is the first of the director's innumerable great romances, gently tucked away in small coastal towns. In these locations, a feeling of transience is in the air, embodied by the fleet of sailors that come and go. Yet, on these very same cobbled streets, young loves also blossom ferociously. Lola, along with the candy-colored The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), constitutes Demy's "romantic trilogy" where loving and maturing appear to be the same journey, at once staggering and fleeting.
In his sung-through musicals, the dialogue beams with the headiness of youthful devotion that slowly ripens into a bittersweet acceptance of life changes. Indeed, Demy's films are love ballads in motion, odes to both amorous yearnings and quaint provincial lives. To watch his work is to let ourselves be swept up in cinematic tides of infatuation, longing, and melancholy, taking us to dazzling emotional realms. | | | |
