Jacques Demy
June 5, 1931 — October 27, 1990 — Pontchâteau, Loire-Atlantique, France
Jacques Demy was a French film director whose color-saturated, all-sung musical films The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) — both made with composer Michel Legrand — gave cinema some of its most achingly beautiful romantic images, blending fairy-tale enchantment with genuine heartbreak.
Nantes, Animation, and the Road to the Nouvelle Vague
Born on June 5, 1931, in Pontchâteau, Loire-Atlantique, Demy grew up in Nantes — a city that would recur obsessively in his work — where he fell in love with cinema, theater, and puppet shows as a child. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes and then at the École technique de photographie et de cinématographie in Paris. After making several short films, his feature debut Lola (1961) — a portrait of a dance hall singer in Nantes — established his visual signature: luminous black-and-white photography, choreographic camera movement, and a melancholy view of love that could flip into joy without warning. He was associated with the French New Wave but stood apart from its intellectualism: Demy's films were romantic and musical where his peers were cerebral.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Demy's masterpiece arrived in 1964: Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), in which every line of dialogue — even "pass the salt" — is sung to Michel Legrand's ravishing score. Catherine Deneuve starred as a young umbrella shop assistant separated from her lover by the Algerian War. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Score. Its final scene — a bittersweet winter encounter at a petrol station — is one of the most emotionally devastating sequences in cinema history.
Did You Know?
Jacques Demy's wife was the director Agnès Varda — one of the most celebrated filmmakers in the history of French cinema. Their partnership was one of the great creative marriages of the New Wave era, with each director maintaining a completely distinct voice. After Demy died in 1990 from AIDS (though this was not publicly disclosed at the time), Varda made a tender, elegiac documentary about his life and Nantes called Jacquot de Nantes (1991), filming him in his final months as she recreated his childhood for the screen.
Later Work and Lasting Legacy
Demy made several more films including The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967, starring Deneuve alongside her sister Françoise Dorléac and Gene Kelly), and the fairy-tale musical Donkey Skin (1970). His American production Model Shop (1969) was less successful, and his later career was inconsistent. He died on October 27, 1990, in Paris, of AIDS-related complications. His legacy has only grown since his death: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is now regularly ranked among the greatest films ever made, and his influence on the contemporary musical film — including Damien Chazelle's La La Land (2016), which explicitly homages his work — is profound. His films' Blu-ray editions are treasures of home cinema.