A Fantasy Feeding Frenzy Revived

A talking rose, a dress the color of time, a finger-slimming elixir, a sung recipe for a “cake d’amour”: Where else but in a film by Jacques Demy – French cinema’s supreme dreamer – could these chimerical objects be found? Now in a new 35-mm color restoration at Film Forum, “Donkey Skin” (1970), Demy’s sixth feature and his third film (and third musical) with Catherine Deneuve, is a gorgeous, nutty fantasia.“I tried making the film from the viewpoint of when I was 7 or 8,” Demy once said of “Donkey Skin,” which is based on a 17th-century fable by Charles Perrault. Demy established his reputation on the childlike wonder and unabashed surfeit of emotion in his two previous musicals, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (1964), in which a simple boy-girl romance is elevated to an all-out chamber opera, and “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (1967), where life and love unfold with all the fervor of an MGM greatest-hits reel.“Donkey Skin” is a quieter film than its song-filled predecessors, but it’s a plenty far-out Freudian fairy tale. As the Queen (a brunette Ms. Deneuve) of the Blue Kingdom lies on her deathbed, her grieving king (Jean Marais) promises he will remarry only if he finds a princess more beautiful than she. And who could be more fetching than a dark-haired Deneuve? Her demure royal daughter (blond Ms. Deneuve), who is baffled by Dad’s planned nuptials. “Poetry deranges, Father,” she responds softly to the King’s proposal, issued on a throne in the shape of a giant white cat.Enter the groovy Lilac Fairy (Delphine Seyrig), sporting peroxided marcels and turned out in lavender chiffon raiment and white platform shoes. “Children do not marry their parents,” she tells the Princess. The Fairy advises her regal charge to ask the King for a series of sartorial impossibilities – a dress the color of the sun, the moon, time, the weather – to thwart a trip down the aisle. But each costume is made (Ms. Deneuve remembers them as “unbelievably heavy dresses”), leading the jittery Princess to her final request: the skin of her father’s beloved donkey, a creature that excretes bullion and bijoux. On the lam as a sullied, smelly scullion draped in an ass’s pelt, the Princess, equipped with one of the Fairy’s cast-off magic wands, finds refuge – and Prince Charming (Jacques Perrin) – in the neighboring Red Kingdom.In “Donkey Skin,” Demy pays homage not only to one of his favorite tales but to one of his cinematic idols: Jean Cocteau. The presence of the handsome, stately Marais – Cocteau’s lover, muse, and leading man in the oneiric masterpieces “Beauty and the Beast” (1946) and “Orpheus” (1950) – is the truest sign of this. As in Cocteau’s otherworldly films, Prince Charming and the Princess spend much of their romance running to each other in slow motion; occasionally they leave their bodies behind in freeze frame, their spectral souls drawn together. Both Cocteau and Demy put their stamp on centuries old tales of love, using cinematic tricks to make love appear hallucinatory. Marais himself was delighted to participate in Demy’s outre opus, noting of the auteur’s wide-eyed sensibility: “Jacques Demy is so human. He’s both serious and childlike. There’s such purity in his gaze, in his heart, too, of course. It comes out in the way he works.”The man mad about movies and fairy tales ends “Donkey Skin” with an anachronistic flourish all his own – imagining, in a way, the Lilac Fairy and the King as rock stars being transported to an outdoor concert at the chateau Chambord (Jim Morrison was present on the set, after all). With this glorious, kooky finale, Demy the dreamer wakes up in the trippy era of Woodstock.Until January 4 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue & Varick Street, 212-727-8110).

A Fantasy Feeding Frenzy Revived

A Fantasy Feeding Frenzy Revived

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