TSPDT - Jacques Demy


	"A whimsical purveyor of modern fairytales, Jacques Demy was one of the rare French directors to make musicals. Demy was brought up in Nantes (see his widow Agnès Varda's film, Jacquot de Nantes, 1991), where his first film, Lola (1961), was set. Its circular construction, frothiness, and long tracking shots are reminiscent of Max Ophüls, the film's dedicatee" - Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006)

	"It is not so much that Demy doesn't believe in happy endings: he simply doesn't believe in permanent ones (as "life is movement"). The ambivalent, bittersweet "feel" of Demy is perhaps best summed up in the end of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, where the lovers, now both married to others, accidentally meet, implicitly acknowledge their love, and return with acceptance to the relationships to which they are committed." - Robin Wood & Rob Edelman (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)

	"Demy was more of a stage manager than a director, but, as Gilbert and Sullivan would have put it, 'a good one too'. He arranged his characters, his settings, with loving care, then tracked around them with fluid and caressing camera. Demy created fairy-tale worlds in miniature, whether in actual fairytales, like The Pied Piper, or modern fables set to music (mainly by Michel Legrand). Either way, his keying of pastel shades is unique in the cinema. Apart possibly from Franco Zeffirelli, no-one made films as prettily as Demy." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)

	"Perhaps the only non-American to lense quality musicals, Demy guided the touching, innovate Umbrellas of Cherbourg (64), which features singing in place of dialogue and the energetic The Young Girls of Rochefort (68)." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)