For many, cinematic adaptations of folk stories have oftentimes proved to be a chance to test out carefully-constructed styles of scenography. For filmmaker Jacques Demy, it was much more than that, since, in his hands, a folk tale written by Charles Perrault becomes the ideal pretext to discuss frivolous things (love and other eternally human demons) confidently, and serious things (the relations between genders and other such topics) even-temperedly.

When Catherine Deneuve is chose in the role of a princess who suddenly has to look for the love of her life, even though nobody bothered to tell her this beforehand, or when Jean Marais precisely takes on the clothes of that perverse emperor, we know that the things that we are witnessing are gaining the additional dimension of a slightly decadent mythology, which is now summoned to reunite itself for the sake of a laboratory experience. Peau d’âne (1970) has aged well, enduring as a sort of hijacked document about generations passing the torch, in an age when society promised to keep them at a constant boiling point.

Between the pages of a book turned yellow by the passing of time – as school compositions used to go – , a handful of individuals, dressed up in nutty costumes and wearing face paint, are valiantly battling in the name of love. In the name of a hot-shot promise, the father convinces himself that he loves his daughter in ways that are much more than fatherly, and that he must thus marry her, offering her the moon in the sky in exchange for the fulfillment of his plot, while the girl takes the road of exile, cloaking herself in a donkey hide in order to conceal her extraordinary beauty. „A once monstrously Oedipal and charmingly infantile”, as American critic J. Hoberman calls it, Peau d’âne is still living its happily ever after, helped by the lively winds of these vaguely compensatory fantasy, in which it is possible to act the fool without someone keeping your tab, or to permanently punish, through the flick of a magic wand, the countless errors of society.

For the slightly cataracted eye of 2021, Demy’s fantastical world, which did enjoy a slight face lift in the time that passed since Charles Perrault’s ages, has all the reasons to come across as bewildering. Demy isn’t a jokester with provincial snobberies – there is nothing further away from his film than, say, Romanian folk hero Păcală –, just as he also cannot place his entire bet on a hardcore fantasy, which would steal one’s gaze and enslave us with its attraction. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said somewhere that kids that will see this film will probably feel like they’ve been somewhat ripped off. Judging by me, his statement is easy to understand in two ways: first of all, in the sense of a deceptively simple narrative thread, which is ostentatiously smooth, in which events don’t seem to be insurmountable obstacles or terrible confrontations with mythical beasts, a la Greuceanu, another Romanian folk hero, but they simply add a couple of minutes of screen time. When the princess decides to ask for help from a fairy – fabulously performed by Delphine Seyrig, a through-and-through feminist in real life too, who here has a couple of things to say about the “hymen” – to face her tempestuous father, the fairy advises her to ask him for the impossible. An impossible that is quickly rendered tangible by the father, which immediately makes him fall prey to ridiculousness, up until it achieves the status of a small diversion that is much rather suited to cinephiles who are delighted by unresolved plot points rather than a rigorous display of action. And the girl’s journey away from home is not inasmuch a rite of passage as it is a detour that is less harsh than the fate foreshadowed in the beginning.

Then – to come back to Rosenbaum -, I think that he also keeps in mind the porosity, like a sort of always half-open door, which Demy’s fantastical world entertains in regards to day to day reality. In this sense, just take a look at the representative helicopter which the lands girl’s father, a downright imperial Jean Marais, at the end of the story: there’s no trace of anger at his prodigal daughter, who fell into the arms of a rather opportunistic prince, but rather an “and they lived happily ever…” type ending which reeks of a Hollywoodian happy end. On the other hand, Demy’s excesses are almost always measured: the horses might be painted in red and blue, Jean Marais might be horsing around in the cardboard rooms of his mighty castle, in a solipsistic roar that is heard all across the kingdom – still, the world never completely loses it, never goes all the way camp, as it would have in the case of a Fassbinder, or as it did, keeping in with proportions, in the case of an Alexandru Tatos in The Secret of the Secret Weapon. Instead, maybe also through its usage of the semi-tragical figure of Deneuve, the story retains a sort of melancholy dignity, a sort of voluptuousness of anguish, as if an existential shadow – a fatality of misfortune – would immediately cast itself upon our protagonists: even before meeting each-other properly, the two are humming, in an anticipatory oneiric sequence, a song about “What are we going to do with all this love…”

If Michel Mourlet was right to say that “cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desire”, then Jacques Demy was right to adapt Perrault. Because folk tales and cinema might have two or three things in common when it comes to miracles. Beyond all of the surprise cameos – one of the genre’s most common tools – , how beautiful is the sequence in which princess Catherine Deneuve discusses in musical steps with her poor, donkey hide-clad alter-ego, and together they bake a pie whose recipe is sung under the shape of lyrics. The sequence is all the more beautiful considering that the pie they take out of the oven looks like a burnt, insufficiently-grown bread: this might be Demy’s way of bowing down in front of these little profane wonders which, far from the perfect dresses which borrow from the brightness of the sun and the magnetism of the moon, passes through our lives from time to time.

Peau d’âne will screen at the Eforie Cinematheque on Saturday, the 17th of July.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.