Jacquot

Agnès Varda's film about the childhood of her husband Jacques Demy. Demy grew up in Nantes as the son of a garage owner. His father wanted him to be a mechanic too. The boy made puppets, looked for a camera, drew frame by frame on paper and tried animation. The film follows those years: the war, the shelters, the first films he saw, and a child discovering cinema on his own. The form is double. The childhood is given in black and white reconstruction, with colour pieces from Demy's later films cut in, so the source of a scene becomes visible: how something seen in childhood found its answer in a film years later. There is also footage of the older Demy; Varda films him in close-up, his hand, his eye, his hair. The timing weights all this. Demy was gravely ill in that period and died shortly after the film was finished. So this is a film made by a wife for a dying husband. Varda does not force the feeling; the illness is never made a subject. A particular work for anyone who likes film history and portraits of directors. For a viewer who does not know Demy's films, some of the references go unanswered.