Cert PG
Agnes Varda’s labour of love to document the life of her husband and fellow director Jacques Demy before his death from terminal illness in 1990. Jacquot tells Demy’s story from his childhood as the son of a garage mechanic to his final days. We are showing this film as a tribute to Agnes Varda who died March 29th this year, many of whose films we have shown in recent years.
We welcome our French cinema expert, Dr Ann Miller to introduce and discuss the film.
Dir: Agnes Varda, France, 118mins, 1991
Programme Notes
Director Jacques Demy, whose musical Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), was a huge success in Britain, was Agnes Varda’s husband. He died in October 1990 but Varda managed, almost, to complete Jacquot de Nantes before his death and indeed involved him in its making. We see him in a number of sequences in the film.
″And now here is Jacquot, a love film, a film a woman has made about the memories of the man she lived with for thirty three years, as she imagines them. The film uses three young actors to recreate the life of Jacques Demy from 1939, when he was eight, through the wartime years and his adolescence, to the years when he learns that he loves film and must be a director”
Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com
Introduced by Dr Ann Miller, formerly of Department of Modern Languages, University of Leicester.
Ann has visited ABCD to introduce a Francophone film every year since 1997 and several of them were Agnès Varda productions – the last being Faces, Places, (Visages, Villages, 2017), which we screened in February this year. A unique and much loved film-maker, Varda died one month later on March 29th.
Comments
- No one better than Ann Miller to introduce this brilliant film! (I do hope it is not the last time we see Ann)
- I loved this film and how it wove the different periods together. Thank you, Ann, for an interesting talk – as always!
- Un film tres bien et gentille (sic)
- Merveilleux! A most enjoyable story of Demy’s life and ‘his’ France as he grew up
- Formidable! A very sweet and charming snapshot of growing up, with memories of a young life during WW2
- Very enjoyable and somewhat reminiscent of Cinema Paradiso
- An oddity. Told with its own cinematic language, Varda delved into Demy’s life story, with the enthusiasm and passion of his formative years coming through strongly. Ann’s introduction gave us plenty of scope to appreciate Demy’s legacy. Her talk highlighted well the points that guided us through the film
- The children of 1939 very well observed – much better (behaved) than in England! A super, multi-layered film – although I was not impressed with Jacquot’s own films. Ann’s introduction was great.