Wanting Happiness: Lola (1961)

“One’s first love is so intense,” the characters in Jacques Demy’s Lola declare again and again. The same might be said of first films — certainly of Lola itself, Demy’s 1961 debut feature. If the fledgling director had had his way, it might have looked a great deal like some of his later works, including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), as he explained in an interview included in Agnès Varda’s 1995 documentary The World of Jacques Demy: “It would have cost 250 million francs, in color and Scope, with lots of dancing and singing and costumes. So [producer Georges] de Beauregard told me, ‘Look, it’s a sweet project, but [Jean-Luc Godard’s] Breathless cost 32 million. If you can do yours for 35, it’s a deal.'” Demy accepted. The resulting film — black and white, with only a single short song — may not resemble his subsequent musicals on a superficial level, but many of their major elements are already present: characters crossing paths, improbable coincidences and, above all, a pervasive air of romance. Perhaps Lola‘s smaller scale, with its relative modesty and lack of frills, actually gives these qualities an added strength and purity.

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Reflections: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

“Take another card,” a fortune teller (Loye Payen) instructs the tearful young woman (Corinne Marchand) sitting across the table from her at the start of Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7. Awaiting a potential cancer diagnosis, singer Cléo Victoire has come to Madame Irma in hopes of receiving some sort of comfort or reason for hope. So far, her tarot reading has been less than encouraging, and although Madame Irma has tried to remain positive throughout, even she jumps back in alarm when she turns over the next card and reveals a skeleton holding a scythe. “This card is not necessarily death’s. It means a complete transformation of your whole being,” the fortune teller says, still endeavoring to make the best of it, but Cléo doesn’t want to hear any more: “I’ve known for two days. I don’t need the results of the tests.” Nevertheless, she immediately asks Madame Irma to read her palm, as if that might reveal something that will cancel out the rest; Madame Irma gazes down at it for a few moments, looks up at Cléo’s face, and finally declares that she can’t read hands. “Is it so bad…?” Cléo asks, bursting into sobs. She leaves in a daze, and it’s not until she encounters a mirror downstairs that she begins to revive. “Ugliness is a kind of death,” she thinks while smiling at her reflection. “As long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive.”

Dans la rue

One of the many things I enjoy about French New Wave movies is seeing people look directly at the camera. I’m not talking about the final shots of The 400 Blows and Breathless; I mean ordinary people who are walking down the street, going about their daily lives, and suddenly notice that someone is shooting a film. Street scenes were a vital part of the nouvelle vague style. Jean Douchet devotes an entire chapter of his book French New Wave to them, in which he explains that they were both a means of saving money and an act of rebellion against the studio system. He then talks about the effect on extras:

Extras dominated film sets throughout the world. As a trade union they took advantage of the corporatism of the other film unions to obtain jobs. Extras were everywhere and no one was spared their presence. What was most typical of the extras of the time (they could still be seen in films by Mizoguchi and even in Bresson’s Pickpocket of 1959), was their total and well-known lack of naturalness. Motionless, they posed, ‘expressed’ themselves, and had no other ambition than to be seen. They got in the way of the modern filmmaker and interfered with the audience’s involvement in the film. By shooting on location, which overturned the rules of the studio, they were thrust outside the camera’s field of view. And as in the films of Lumière and Griffith, the great silent films or the first talkies (1930-1933), Renoir (Boudu or La Chienne), Vigo, Barnet, the impression of life once again swept across the screen. When people were needed for a scene (a café, newsstand, bus stop), friends were used, or friends of friends, or even passersby who were willing to give an hour or two of their time. It not only lent an air of truth to the film, it was fun as well.