Product Details

• Actors: Philippe Maron, Edouard Joubeaud, Laurent Monnier, Brigitte De Villepoix, Daniel Dublet
• Format: PAL
• Rated: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00004CNY5
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #544,284 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Agnes Varda's 1991 tribute to her late husband, Jacques Demy--Varda's fellow pioneer in the French New Wave movement of the 1950s and early 1960s--is a moving combination of reenacted scenes from Demy's fanciful childhood, clips from his movies (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Donkey Skin), and filmed interviews with him shortly before he passed away. Varda's efforts lead to a touching and evocative portrait of a man who saw, even as a boy, no distinction between his imagination and the more magical traditions of theater and film. The cast of unknown actors portraying Demy and other people in reconstructions of his memories are very good, and the interesting tension between the function of these scenes as storytelling and their inclusion in Varda's larger biographical essay instantly recalls the intensely personal nature of Demy's own lush, ambitious experiments behind the camera. --Tom Keogh

From The New Yorker

Agnès Varda's film is a graceful, affecting tribute to her husband, the filmmaker Jacques Demy, who died (of leukemia, at age fifty-nine) in 1990. Documentary footage shows Demy in the last year of his life, reminiscing about his childhood and adolescence in the coastal town of Nantes. His liver-spotted hands caress the cheap cameras with which he shot his first movies-most of them crude but imaginative animated shorts with paper-cutout characters. Varda fleshes out her husband's memories with dramatized episodes from his early life, and uses clips from his mature films-"Lola" (1961) and "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964) are the best known-to demonstrate the relationship between the mundane experiences of his youth and the ravishing romantic art he created as an adult. The film's elegiac, reflective rhythm is seductive and very moving. Varda conveys the joy of young Jacques's learning, with primitive means, to tell stories on film, and gives us evidence, too, of how fully the movies we know him by expressed his dreamy, passionate nature. This picture celebrates its subject by treating Demy's biography as an instance of a rare continuity between life and movie art-as a miraculous, ephemeral convergence, like "Lola." In French. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars youth, cinema, and dreams or Dreams do come true, June 12, 2000

By 

"kd4ygc" (South Carolina USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jacquot [VHS] (VHS Tape)

If anything fasinates young people it has to be movies and how they work. This story is that kind of story. A work by the world Renowned Foreign films Director Jacquot Demy, this story shows him as a child in the 30's during the early stages of WWII and just how he occupied his mind and his family. It is a great depiction of what dedication and determination truely are.

5.0 out of 5 stars a heartfelt and moving tribute from one great director to another, November 7, 2009

By 

Muzzlehatch (the walls of Gormenghast) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Jacquot [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I'll start right off by saying that if you haven't seen any of the major films from the subject of this terrific bio-docudrama, Jacques (Jacquot) Demy, then you probably won't get much out of it and in fact I'd suggest you'd be much better off watching THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG instead. That 1964 musical is probably Demy's most famous film, and it's one that is featured in several clips (along with every one of the late director's features if I'm not mistaken) in this loving recreation of the director's early years, taken from his memoirs and directed by his equally talented director wife as he was dying of AIDS.

The film shifts fluidly from black and white to color - often a remarkable reproduction of 60s Technicolor, perhaps a tribute more to young Jacquot's early visions than to his 30s and 40s surroundings - and from the present-day (1990) dying man conversing about his past to recreations of those formative years, falling in love with movies in SNOW WHITE (1937, when Demy was 6) through leaving for film school in Paris after years of trying to convince his stubborn working class father that film was a worthy profession at the end of the 1940s.

World War II is of course a central motif in any film about people living in France during that era, but interestingly enough the film takes the unsentimental childish view that (presumably) was reality for the director at the time - it was for him, living in a provincial town in the west of the country and being lucky enough to come through it with family intact, an inconvenience or an adventure most of the time - here he discovers a love of the country, but there he discovers an abhorrence of violence, which ends up reflecting in some of the sunniest and most fairy-tale-like films in French cinema. No, for the young Jacques Demy the real struggle was with his fair but very firm male parent, never indulgent like his mother and determined that his eldest son should learn a real trade as a mechanic - much of Parpluies certainly derives from those teen-age years of tech school and working on cars.

My favorite parts of the film are probably those devoted to Demy's nascent homegrown film career - unlike many of his better-known peers like Godard and Chabrol, Demy was never a critic and started out making films not long after he began to be obsessed with watching them, on his own at first with hand-cranked and then cheap electric 9.5 mm cameras. Several reconstructions of his early work with human actors and with animation provide both amusement and a real sense that here is a person who found his calling early, and never gave up despite the easier paths open to him. It would be an excellent film for all budding filmmakers to watch, and it's another example of Varda's terrific understanding of the documentary and essay forms, not quite in either category, not quite fiction, but all love and affection.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good, but not for everyone, January 8, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Jacquot [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This is a very poignant glimpse into the childhood of filmmaker Jacquot, and I liked it alot, but I don't think it's for everyone.

Even though I enjoyed the story and the characters, I found myself checking the clock every five minutes. It was just a little too slow.