The Young Girls of Rochefort

Demy’s celebration of life in the rhythm of jazz doesn’t leave all of the dancing to the actors. The camera also dances. Its upward, downward and circular movements are partially motivated by the characters’ movements and partially by musical excess. The intertwining of these two approaches occurs in one of the long opening shots, when the camera, using the characters as points of reference, sails into the room where a ballet lesson is taking place. ___ On the one hand, Demy mines the reservoir of classic Hollywood musicals (quotes from On the Town and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the casting of Gene Kelly); on the other hand, he breaks the pastel idyll of the world of musicals with subtle subversion of genre conventions. The characters do not always dance in strictly symmetrical lines and in frontally composed shots. Demy doesn’t stick with one angle for long, as he constantly makes us aware of the three-dimensionality of the space, and respecting the centre of the shot is not mandatory for the dancers. On the contrary, the obsessive Berkeley-esque symmetry is parodied by the mirrored dancing of the Gemini twins. After all, the whole story is built on doubling and pairing (of characters, colours, musical motifs), the seeking of opposites that attract. ___ Contrary to Hollywood convention, a substantial part of the film was shot on location, thanks to which the mise-en-scéne of the scenes set in the glassed-in café, which Demy uses as a means of creating a refrain in the rhythmisation of the narrative, is very lively. The characters disrupt this harmonious world here and there with a line such as “He was an asshole” or “(...) so we want to sleep with you", and through the newspapers, Rochefort is touched a few times by rather heinous crimes (the victim of one such crime was supposed to be a woman with the artistic pseudonym of Lola, which is an obvious reference to Demy’s debut film). Between the lines, it is thus self-reflexively acknowledged that the levity of the presentation only draws attention away from serious issues, that it is a means of escape and that the film’s creators are well aware of this. The balancing between stylised and authentic settings strengthens the impression that fantasy and reality do not have to be mutually exclusive. They can coexist. ___ It’s up to the characters to decide when they will dance into the realm of dreams. The musical numbers, in which – following the example of early vaudeville musicals – the characters dance on stages intended specifically for that purpose, come across as being the most artificial. Freedom of choice disappears, because there is nothing to do other than to sing and dance in the defined space. ___ Despite the use of alienating effects, which is far less tiresome than in some films by New Wave directors, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort  is primarily a two-hour romantic reverie (cutting its runtime wouldn’t have hurt anything). Demy invites us into a city in which the hyper-realistic colours of the realistic setting adapt to the mood of the characters, in which no one ever has a more dangerous implement at hand than a musical instrument, in which every movement can easily be transformed into a dance, and for whose residents there is no (traumatic) collective memory, but only a (joy-inducing) collective song. A song that bridges the differences between generations, genders and temperaments. It is naïve. But it is also uplifting. 75% (07/23/2013) (less) (more)