The city fathers of Rochefort have just erected these statues of its two most famous daughters : real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorleac as they appear, also as sisters, in Jacques Demy’s 1967 Les Demoiselles de Rochefort.
In my first weeks of living in France, my wife-to-be took me to a party nearby. The house stood on a headland looking out across the estuary of the Gironde and the Charente, past the Napoleonic fortifications of Fort Boyard, towards the ocean and the ancient port. Centuries of wind had bent the trees into sinuous feminine shapes redolent of art nouveau. I drank Kir Royale and tried to follow the conversation with my movie subtitle French.
One guest who spoke good English took pity on me. “Even after Los Angeles,” he said, “all this...” His wave took in the moonlit ocean and the brittle chatter. “...must be strange.”
”Not entirely,” I said. “In fact, I feel I know it already. Because of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort.”
”Well, here is a coincidence,” he said, “because I worked on that film. I was liaison between Jacques Demy and the city. If you like, I could walk you around Rochefort and show you where we shot it. Tomorrow, perhaps. If you are not too busy.”
We weren’t too busy.
No film evokes for me the grace of life in France. It’s our family’s feel-good movie. To watch the opening scenes of the travelling trade show arriving in Rochefort and see the dancers lazily stretch and pirouette to Michel Legrand’s jazz score is like drinking cool water on a stifling day.
George Chakiris and Grover Dale.
But then they explode, dancing through the streets with such vivacity and good humour that housewives and storekeepers and especially sailors in their white uniforms and red-pompommed hats drop everything to join George Chakiris, Grover Dale, Deneuve, Dorleac, and – unexpectedly – Gene Kelly in ecstatic movement.
“It nearly didn’t happen,” Bernard, our new friend, said the next day. We were sitting at a café on Place Colbert, in the heart of Rochefort, where many of the scenes in the film take place, and where Bernard, Demy and the mayor had their initial meetings.
Demy described a key establishing shot that craned up from the square into a first-floor window where Dorleac and Deneuve teach music and dance.
Francoise Dorleac and Michel Piccoli.
“He pointed out the building he wanted,” said Bernard. “It was a bank, so of course they would never agree. I asked if any other building would do. Jacques said there was only one other – but it was the mairie, the town hall, and the room he wanted was the mayor’s office!”
“Well, I’m afraid that’s impossible,” the mayor said.
For Demy, this was a deal-breaker. There were plenty of other towns along the coast, he said, gathering up his papers. It could just as easily be Les Demoiselles de Biarritz. Seeing all that publicity and revenue slipping away, His Honour made a bold decision.
“Maybe my office could do with some redecoration,” he said, and moved out so that the twins could move in.
Demy delayed the film for two years until Gene Kelly was available, and, deciding French dancers lacked the necessary well-drilled technique, imported British performers and choreographer Norman Maen from the hard school of TV variety.
Where Les Parapluies de Cherbourg had a relatively straightforward narrative, Demy complicates the story of Demoiselles, delaying the meeting of fated lovers Maxence and Delphine to literally the last minute, and then staging it off-camera. He also scatters linguistic oddities through the script. One character, for no particular reason, speaks always in 14-syllable Alexandrines, while Danielle Darrieux refuses to marry Michel Piccoli’s character Simon Dame because it would make her Madame Dame.
In 2016, Damien Chazelle was praised for recapturing the vitality of Demoiselles in La La Land but not by anyone who knew Demy’s film. Some felt he tried too hard, others not hard enough. The real truth was articulated in an episode of the TV series Mad Men. An agency is hired to adapt a scene from the Ann-Margret musical Bye Bye Birdie into a soft drink commercial. They use the same music, and perfectly reproduce the background colour and camera style. The girl is a near lookalike for Ann-Margaret. It looks right, sounds right, smells right - except it doesn’t work.
John Slattery, as veteran ad. man Roger Sterling, knows exactly why.
“It’s not Ann-Margret.”
Sometimes only the original will do. To borrow a line from the advertising for another peerless product: Demy - There Is No Substitute.