Jacquot

(Jacquot de Nantes)

Digital Restoration
Recommended for ages 12 & up

featuring

Philippe Maron, Edouard Joubeaud, Laurent Monnier, Brigitte de Villepoix,

Inspired by the stories and memories of her husband, Jacques Demy, Varda created an affecting and enlightening portrait of the artist as a young boy, exploring the inspiration for Demy’s films in the everyday world of his Nantes upbringing. Filming in the places of Jacquot’s youth—his father’s garage and the family kitchen where life indeed was all singing, if not all dancing; the rural home where Demy and his brother spent the war years—Varda beautifully employed Nantes residents as her nonprofessional actors. Varda’s conceit is to have everything that feeds Jacquot’s creative world—the puppet shows, the movie posters, a flamboyant aunt from Rio—in the saturated color of his own later movies, clips from which are relevantly interspersed here. But ironically, it is the black-and-white in which Varda so richly and skillfully evokes French life in the forties that feeds our own insatiable cinephilia.

Judy Bloch
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Agnès Varda
Cinematographer
  • Patrick Blossier
  • Agnès Godard
  • Georges Strouvé
Language
  • French
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W/Color
  • DCP
  • 118 mins
Source
  • Janus Films