A Room In Town (Demy, 1982): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.45pm
This film, which also screens on June 24th, is part of the Michel Piccoli season at BFI Southbank. Yoiu can find all the details here.
Chicago Reader review:
Jacques Demy’s highly personal aesthetic coincided with public taste exactly once—on the 1963 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,
which became an international success. But later audiences never quite
accepted Demy’s conception of a musical cinema, which combines location
shooting, naturalistic narratives, and psychologically complex
characters with the high stylization of sung dialogue. When released in
France in 1982, A Room in Town died at the boxoffice, yet it is
one of the most beautiful, assured, and cinematically inventive films of
its period, a stylistic tour-de-force that doesn’t distort and destroy
the real (as did Diva) but inflects and accentuates it—that
brings out the lyricism, nobility, and tragedy inherent in ordinary
situations. The action takes place in Nantes in 1955, during a violent
ship-builders strike; one of the strikers (Richard Berry), though he is
engaged to marry his pregnant girl friend, finds himself drawn to his
landlady’s unhappily married daughter (Dominique Sanda). The epic,
social background provides a counterpoint (literally, because the
strike, too, is carried on in song), to the intimate domestic tragedy of
the foreground, where the same broad issue (the relationship of workers
and bourgeoisie) is replayed. But the simple material is not played
simplistically: though Demy offers melodramatic figures of good (the
innocent girl friend) and evil (Sanda’s husband, the cruel owner of a
small electronics shop, played with operatic fury by Michel Piccoli),
the emotional center of the film is an apparently marginal figure—the
landlady, magnificently incarnated by Danielle Darrieux, who must
witness the conflict, divided between her affection for Berry and her
love for her daughter, between the romantic fulfillment that Berry
promises and the financial security providedby Piccoli. All of the
expressive tensions of Demy’s cinema are focused on her: a sober
acceptance of reality undermined by a yearning for the absolute, an
epiphaic romanticism in trragic collision with incontrovertable facts.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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