Slideshow
JACQUOT DE NANTES
France, 1991
Directed by Agnès Varda
Written by Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy
Starring Philippe Maron
In French with English subtitles
Approx. 120 min.
Tracing Jacques Demy’s life from his childhood in his beloved village of Nantes, through the war, his teen years, and his growth as a filmmaker, Varda uses actors of three different ages to recreate his life, and she incorporates clips from his movies, her own personal remembrances, and present-day footage of Demy filmed shortly before he died. “His childhood was so present for the two of us that I got the idea to film it,” said Varda of the film’s inception,“to please him but also to film a vocation in the making.”
Presented with support from The George Fasel Memorial Fund for Classic French Cinema and The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund
Reviews
“JACQUOT DE NANTES is the sort of film that no one but Miss Varda would have made, or for the matter, could have made. It’s neither documentary nor, in the usual sense, fiction. It’s a one-of-a-kind celebration of a very gentle man, Jacques Demy.”
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times
“Documentary is transformed into a visual commentary on love and death, birth, and old age.”
– Richard Roud