DVDs: French Musicals
A key figure in French cinema's "New Wave" of the 1960s, Alain Resnais' films include Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, and Stavisky, the latter with a background score by Stephen Sondheim. His 2003 film Pas sur la Bouche Not on the Lips didn't get a theatrical release in this country, so we're fortunate that a DVD is now available of this curiosity of a picture.
What we have here is a straightforward filming of an intimate French stage musical of the 1920s. The composer was Maurice Yvain 1891-1965, best known in this country for the melody of the Fanny Brice song "My Man." Yvain wrote the music for three "mouth" operettas, Ta Bouche 1922, and called One Kiss on Broadway in 1923, Bouche à Bouche 1925, and Pas sur la Bouche 1925. With book and lyrics by André Barde, Pas sur la Bouche ran in Paris for more than a year, and was produced as Just a Kiss in England.
Not on the Lips concerns a wife named Gilberte and her industrialist husband, Georges. Gilberte has concealed from her husband the fact that, during a sojourn in America, she was previously married. She has kept that information a secret because Georges maintains the firm belief that a wife will always belong to the man who came first in her life. When Georges invites to his home a business associate from America, the American businessman turns out to be none other than Eric Thompson, Gilberte's first husband, who quickly becomes interested in resuming his relationship with Gilberte. Things are further complicated by five other principal characters and by the fact that Thompson does not want to be kissed on the lips; it seems a governess once did that to him and forever altered his life.
Playing Huguette, who's in love with a young male admirer of Gilberte's, is Audrey Tautou, known here for her role in the film Amelie. Playing Thompson and having a good deal of fun speaking French with an overt American accent is Lambert Wilson, who was Carl-Magnus in the Judi Dench/National Theatre A Little Night Music and appeared in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions the same year as Lips.
Lips features a great deal of teasing, playful dialogue among its eight characters, along with many tinkling songs, including a catchy title number and a terrific second-act finale. All of the principals do their own singing, with mixed results. The subtitles for the song lyrics are in rhyming couplets.
Resnais shoots it all straight on, and the result can be static, with some songs filmed in a single, cut-less shot. There are only two locations, the home of Gilberte and Georges and a bachelor apartment where everyone winds up in the third act. The characters frequently offer asides spoken directly into the camera. And sometimes when characters exit, they dissolve into thin air.
The fact that a new film has been made of this bubbly 1925 stage musical it was previously filmed in 1931 is remarkable, all the more so because it was directed by no less than Resnais. The result is pretty fascinating, if overextended at almost two hours.
Even though it's a '20s musical, you can tell that Resnais is here and there paying homage to color movie musicals of the '40s and '50s. And even with the helpful subtitles, the picture is likely to be enjoyed even more by those who understand at least a modicum of French.
DONKEY SKIN Koch Lorber
I've written in this space about the many charms of the French musical films The Umbrellas of Cherbourg 1964 and The Young Girls of Rochefort 1967. Both were written and directed by Jacques Demy, another New Wave figure, with lyrics by Demy and music by Michel Legrand, the composer of the Broadway musical Amour. Cherbourg is entirely sung, while Rochefort features almost non-stop singing and dancing. Both Cherbourg and Rochefort have become stage musicals in France, with Cherbourg also produced on the New York stage.
Demy and Legrand collaborated on a third movie musical, Donkey Skin Peau d'Ane, and the 1970 film was recently released on DVD. Donkey Skin is based on the seventeenth-century fairy tale by Charles Perrault, who also gave the world Cinderella. Like Cherbourg and Rochefort, it stars the regally beautiful Catherine Deneuve.
In Perrault's story, a King Jean Marais, of Jean Cocteau's film of Beauty and the Beast promises his dying Queen Deneuve that he will only remarry a woman more beautiful than she. After rejecting various possibilities, the king decides to marry his own daughter also Deneuve. Horrified, the princess consults the Lilac Fairy Delphine Seyrig, who functions as her fairy godmother. Together, the two concoct a plan to make elaborate demands of the king as stipulations for marriage.
The final request is for the skin of the king's prized donkey, an animal that excretes gold and gems. When the king actually fulfills this request, the princess disguises herself in the donkey skin and flees, taking a job as a scullion who cleans pigstys. A handsome prince Jacques Perrin, also of Rochefort comes along and penetrates her disguise. He requests that "Peau d'Ane" bake him a cake. She does, concealing inside it a ring. As with Cinderella's glass slipper, the prince asks that every woman in his kingdom try on the ring, until, at last, it fits "Peau d'Ane," who is revealed in all her natural splendor.
As in Cherbourg and Rochefort, Demy's extravagant use of color is notable. Here, he paints the King's kingdom all in blue, the prince's all in red, right down to the color of the horses. But Demy's imagination doesn't end there. The king reclines on a throne that's a giant white cat. The old crone who employs Peau d'Ane spits out toads. The prince consults a talking rose. And the Lilac Fairy and the King arrive via helicopter for the princess's wedding.
Restored and remastered by Demy's widow, director Agnes Varda, Peau d'Ane is a visual treat. There's a good deal less music here than in the two previous Legrand-Demy films. The score consists of seven numbers, about the length of a score from a Disney animated feature. And like other fairy-tale adaptations, Donkey Skin functions simultaneously as a musical for children and as a romance with adult themes. Those who have enjoyed Cherbourg and Rochefort will want to collect Donkey Skin as well.