Jacquot de Nantes (Agnès Varda, 1991)

Jacquot de Nantes

1991 // France // Agnès Varda

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As much as I love Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda and their respective films, I find myself at times at odds against JACQUOT DE NANTES, an autobiographical fictional film based on Demi’s childhood memories directed by Varda before Demy‘s death in Oct 1990 from complications of AIDS. The film was released in 1991, but Demy was able to appear, despite feebly, in the film as a real-footage documentary of his last few months alive, all captured and viewed through the lens of Varda, Demy’s lifelong wife. There’s a deep sense of sadness evoked from all the close-ups on Demy as well as the occasional punctuation from a time-elapsed natural landscape (e.g. light and shadow on a wall shifting with time).

The film is comprised of three portions, the largest part is a linear narrative of Demy’s childhood, from being 8 years old growing in Nantes at the end of the thirties to 19 years old when he moved to Paris for the study of filmmaking. There’s the most beautiful and lyrical part, we witness the young Jacquot, portrayed by three different actors in three different periods, develops an interest in theater and puppet show, and finally in cinema (from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Children of Paradise). He starts to mimic the performance, builds up his own cardboard theater. And the war arrives, we have bits and pieces of his vignettes in wartime, not as dramatic as other fictional war films but his interest in cinema continues to grow exponentially. The last act is basically his determination to shoot his own stop-motion animation in the attic over his father’s garage and his confrontation with his father who insists that he learn a trade in the mechanic but not filmmaking.

This major portion is easily the most compelling part within the film, yet Varda chooses to insert scenes from Demy’s films, emphasizing how important Demy’s ‘memories’ influence his artistic output. Somehow it’s too indulgent for my taste for a female director repeatedly reminding us how great her husband and her husband’s works are. It hinders me from attaching to the young Jacquot occasionally and robs my opportunity to make the connection by myself. The insertions of footage from Demy’s films, and the appearance of Demy respectively in the second and the third portions of the film, as a whole they strengthen the fact that this film is a documentary, while the central story as a reenactment.

I admire this love letter Varda made for her dying husband, it’s sweet and extremely moving. Varda’s films have always been about connecting her present life with her reminiscence, she’s the perfect person to complete this project, she even did her own version of retrospection before her death. In JACQUOT DE NANTES, the impending death is palpable, it’s not only a love letter to Demy and his vocation in cinema, but it’s also a grief therapy of the beloved one we lose.

Film’s Trailer