The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (108 page)

Philadelphia
—alas. Hollywood now congratulates itself on the courage of the project, and its success—after many had been terrified of the film. I think it’s feeble, devoid of the things Demme is best at: character, the unexpected, mischief. The plot is full of holes; the mindset is out-of-date. The Hanks lawyer is a blank beneath the grim makeup. Yet large audiences watched in awe:
Philadelphia
is not quite about AIDS, but it may be the first Hollywood film that says, it’s OK, hug a gay. Which is something, I suppose—but no reason for anyone as hip as Demme being involved.

Demme’s latest years have not been very satisfactory. He has done a lot of work on small films and helped produce
Devil in a Blue Dress
(95, Carl Franklin);
That Thing You Do!
(96, Tom Hanks) and the TV documentary
Mandela
(96, Jo Menell and Angus Gibson), for which he deserves thanks. But Demme is at his prime, and
Beloved
is not much to show for that. Indeed,
Beloved
is very boring—which is something no one would, or should, expect from this director.

The Truth About Charlie
was a dreadful film, and unmistakable evidence that some dismay had overtaken Demme.
The Manchurian Candidate
(04) was the greater a disaster in that so much that was golden had been ruined. Then a few years later, some critics rallied to support
Rachel Getting Married
—nothing helped; it was a travesty and a mess.

Rebecca De Mornay
, b. Los Angeles, 1961
At this point, I feel some obligation to offer pen and page to
The New Republic
’s Stanley Kauffmann: no actress in recent times has enjoyed more gallant, persevering, or intelligent support than Ms. De Mornay has had from Mr. Kauffmann. If only he could reliably get her into a string of more worthwhile pictures—except that then the by-no-means young Mr. K might burst (here would be a subject fit for von Sternberg, Michael Powell or … so many).

At any rate, Mr. Kauffmann’s raptures are understandable; I hope he can understand they are not his alone. Ms. De Mornay is a sumptuous, pale-eyed blonde whose intelligence gives her a decided edge of coolness, or of thinking about something else. Of course, in great roles—as Hedda Gabler, Elektra, or Blanche DuBois—her looks and her mind might close together with a very satisfying click. But the possibility remains that her intelligence may be a little bewildered or daunted by her beauty—indeed, it may be provoked by it. As a unified woman, she could prove a little less mysterious—not that Hollywood is likely to challenge her in the roles listed above.

So
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
(92, Curtis Hanson) may be as good as it gets: an unashamed, expert potboiler, yet founded in unusual psychological interest, with the barbs on Hanson’s script depending on the authenticity and precision of the actress. (Hanson may have been expressly cunning in setting up De Mornay and Anabella Sciorra as mother and nanny—thus De Mornay has a serenity and Sciorra a breathless ineptness that seem wrong, but very revealing.) Of course, De Mornay can only hint at poignant derangement in the nanny, and only make a bit more of many moments than they deserve. The project does not begin to grasp unity or development, and so the actress’s very epiphanies ensure our final disappointment, just as they surely give energy to the character’s climactic malice. Good actresses do deserve better people to play.

De Mornay had a European upbringing (another subtle undercurrent against the mainstream) as well as an education at the Lee Strasberg Institute. She was a sharp, funny, and utterly memorable customer in
One From the Heart
(82, Francis Coppola) and then a kid’s dream whore in
Risky Business
(83, Paul Brickman). That first smash hit was just as unreal and acute as
Cradle
, and it employed the same faintly dreamy or distracted distance in the actress’s performance. In the process, she reduced maybe 90 percent of the male audience to the level of Tom Cruise’s dreams.

She was in
Testament
(85, Lynne Littman); hardly recognizable but valiant and fierce in
Runaway Train
(85, Andrei Konchalovsky); she was the utility infielder actress in
The Slugger’s Wife
(85, Hal Ashby); she was allowed to be an actress in
The Trip to Bountiful
(85, Peter Masterson)—can you remember? She faced up to “necessary career choices” in
And God Created Woman
(87, Roger Vadim); and has to take responsibility for
Feds
(88, Dan Goldberg) and
Dealers
(89, Colin Bucksey). She was also in
Backdraft
(91, Ron Howard);
Blind Side
(93, Geoff Murphy);
Guilty as Sin
(93, Sidney Lumet); and
The Three Musketeers
(93, Stephen Herek).

Most of her later work has been for TV only, and it’s not very distinguished:
Getting Out
(94, John Korty);
Never Talk to Strangers
(95, Peter Hall);
The Winner
(96, Alex Cox); Wendy in the TV version of
The Shining
(97, Mick Garris);
The Con
(98, Steven Schachter);
Thick as Thieves
(99, Scott Sanders);
Night Ride Home
(99, Glenn Jordan);
A Table for One
(99, Ron Senkowski);
Range of Motion
(00, Donald Wrye);
The Right Temptation
(00, Lyndon Chubbuck);
Salem Witch Trials
(01, Joseph Sargent);
Identity
(03, James Mangold)—“Didn’t you use to be an actress?” someone asks her.

She was in
Raise Your Voice
(04, Sean McNamara);
Lords of Dogtown
(05, Catherine Hardwicke);
Wedding Crashers
(05, David Dobkin);
American Venus
(07, Bruce Sweeney);
Music Within
(07, Steven Sawalich).

Jacques Demy
(1931–90), b. Pont-Château, France
1960:
Lola
. 1961: “La Luxure,” episode in
Les Sept Péchés Capitaux
. 1962:
La Baie des Anges
. 1964:
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
. 1967:
Les Demoiselles de Rochefort/The Young Girls of Rochefort
. 1969:
Model Shop
. 1970:
Peau d’Âne/The Magic Donkey
. 1972:
The Pied Piper
. 1973:
L’Événement le
Plus Important Depuis Que l’Homme a Marché sur la Lune/The Slightly Pregnant Man
. 1979:
Lady Oscar
. 1980:
La Naissance du Jour
(TV). 1982:
Une Chambre à Ville
. 1985:
Parking
. 1988:
La Table Tournante; Trois Places pour le 26
.

Of all the New Wave directors who once professed their joy in cinema, Demy remained most faithful to the delights of sight and sound and to the romance of movie iconography. With loving attention to those Atlantic coast towns—Nantes, Rochefort, and Cherbourg—where he grew up, Demy invented a world of benign and enchanting imagination. It is constantly on the verge of fairy story, but never yields to the foreboding of the Grimm brothers. Instead, Demy has his own domain of chivalry and love, born out of Perrault and schoolgirls’ novelettes, the rural sentiment of Rouquier, and the Hollywood scheme of coincidence and happily-ever-after, but as distinguished and ennobling as, say,
The Beautiful Hours of the Duc de Berry
.

La Baie des Anges
is the test: if you feel that it evades such issues as the moral deterioration and familial breakdown that come from gambling, then Demy is a frivolous dabbler; but if you respond to the plunging music of Michel Legrand, the luminous black-and-white Côte d’Azur, the doting over Jeanne Moreau’s performance, and the saintly insistence on love conquering all, then Demy is a spellbinder who brings a religious awe to rose-colored hokum. And it is not sufficient to concede that
La Baie des Anges
is delightful entertainment. It is a description of paradise that is entirely consistent and inviting. Consider who else in the cinema deals in paradise, and you begin to recognize Demy’s rare achievement. This is the frivolity that only von Sternberg and Ophuls had risked to ameliorate sadness.

After studying at ENPC, Demy assisted the animator Paul Grimault and then Georges Rouquier on
Lourdes et Ses Miracles
(54),
Honegger
(55), and
SOS Noronha
(57). Through the late fifties, he made shorts for himself:
Le Sabotier du Val-de-Loire
(55);
Le Bel Indifférent
(57), from Cocteau;
Musée Grévin
(58, with Jean Masson);
Ars
(59); and
La Mère et l’Enfant
(59, with Masson). Then, in 1960, after the dedication—to Max Ophuls—and accompanied by Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, a white Cadillac fills the CinemaScope frame and a tall, blond man all in white, even his Stetson, stares out at the sea. Immediately, a unique vision was established: the reverent rediscovery of hackneyed images, and the bold coupling of classical and romantic culture.
Lola
was a plan for a career: it not only contained a handful of variants on the themes of chance meeting and long-lost love, but set up signposts leading to other films. Later, Demy pursued some of those paths, reveling in his own nostalgia. Lola reappeared (much sadder) in
Model Shop;
the young man in
Lola
marries Catherine Deneuve in
Les Parapluies;
the sailor who visits Lola at the cabaret is revived in
Les Demoiselles
—as both the central sailors and a Gene Kelly who has not quite forgotten the steps of
On the Town
. As for Lola herself, she is not just a curtsy to
Lola Montès
and
The Blue Angel
, not only the tenderest direction that Anouk Aimée has ever had, but the archetype of Demy’s heroine—beautiful, sentimental, hopeful, resigned, gay, nervy, trembling between tears and laughter. The epigraph for
Lola
says it all (from a Chinese proverb): “Pleure qui peut … Rit qui veut …”

Demy adored his players: Aimée, Elina Labour-dette, Annie Dupeyroux, and the marvelously serious Marc Michel in
Lola;
Moreau and Claude Mann in
La Baie des Anges
, the former forever dithering like the ball in a slowing roulette wheel, the latter still and watchful as a croupier; Catherine Deneuve and Anne Vernon in
Cherbourg;
Deneuve, Dorléac, and Darrieux in
Rochefort
. He was, too, a constructor of intricate screenplays in which every episode reflects on others:
Lola
is as shapely a drama as
The Marriage of Figaro
or
Pale Fire
. These are great virtues, but they would be literary ones without the luxurious richness of his imagery and his unrivaled sense of music. Who else could have made
Baie des Anges
so radiant in black and white? Who else could have proved
Cherbourg
so pretty? Demy had taken over Ophüls’s fluid camera, but restrained its most lavish movements. He delighted rather more in tableaux—sudden lyrical effects like the slow-motion roundabout in
Lola
, the vivid scarlet bar in
Parapluies
, the churchlike shadow of the casino in
La Baie des Anges
. Notice, too, his persistent use of white in
Lola
and the contrast of black lace and fur boa in the cabaret.

As for music,
Les Parapluies
is a notional folly made utterly reasonable by Demy’s conviction and Legrand’s melodies. But music had already been used in
Lola
and
La Baie des Anges
with exhilarating force—the roulette tune in the latter is one of the finest uses of music to accentuate drama in all cinema, while Lola’s song is a delightful piece of offhand recitative. The whimsical use of song in René Clair’s early films is gloriously enlarged in Demy’s movies.

It should be said that Demy’s first three films are his best.
Rochefort
seems more hampered by the stress on song.
Model Shop
shows some signs of unease with American conditions.
Peau d’Âne
is his clearest acceptance of fairy story (it is from Perrault), chilly in its modernity of character, but minus the fruitful correlative of some mundane French provincial town as its setting (something Demy may have noticed first in Cocteau’s
Orphée
). However,
The Pied Piper
fatally lacks the intense control that Demy had previously exercised over such light material.

His later work was not as convincing as the early films, though
Une Chambre à Ville
is a fascinating application of the operatic technique to an unusually dark story.
Trois Places
had Yves Montand, playing himself, returning to Marseilles and searching for a lost love—the lyricism seemed a touch strained.

Demy was married to Agnes Varda. After his death she made a film that recounted his life,
Jacquot de Nantes
—on which he had script credit.

Twenty-plus years after Demy’s astonishing productivity in the sixties and early seventies, he does not seem quite possible. Did he really live? Have those wistful, gentle, and melodic films been made? Or is he only an ideal director one has dreamed? Already, young filmgoers do not know his name. It is more plausible as legend than as film fact that someone made movies in which all the dialogue was sung (years before
Pennies from Heaven
). It is already more forlorn hope than likelihood that anyone would make pictures as graceful and humane as those of Max Ophuls, as poised between speech and music as Stephen Sondheim. It may be more comfortable in this age of dread-ridden movies to believe Demy never existed.

Dame Judi
(Judith Olivia)
Dench
, b. York, England, 1934
In Britain, universally, and in America now, Judi Dench is recognized as not just a great actress, but as a model for acting. She has authority and experience. That’s what the “Dame” is supposed to signify. It’s inherent in television documentaries that observe her developing a role—on stage, say, for
A Little Night Music
. It’s there in the sinecure called “M” in the Bond films—and the subsequent enlargement of that role for her sake. Over the years, she has been known on stage for
Amy’s View, Absolute Hell, The Cherry Orchard, Antony and Cleopatra
(opposite Anthony Hopkins),
Mother Courage, Pack of Lies
, a sexy Lady Bracknell,
Macbeth
(opposite Ian McKellen)—and we’re still only as far back as 1976. Working reliably within the rich range of the English theatre and its institutions, she had taken on the classical tradition and several modern parts. She had abided and built a citadel, starting with her Old Vic work in the late fifties and her 1960 Zeffirelli
Romeo and Juliet
, with John Stride.