(1970) “Children do not marry their parents.” In the fairy tale Blue Kingdom, beloved monarch Jean Marais (Cocteau’s star and muse: Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, etc.) grants his dying queen Catherine Deneuve’s last request: if he remarries, it must only be to a princess even more beautiful than herself. But the only one who fits the bill is his own daughter (Deneuve again), who tries putting him off with seemingly-impossible demands: dresses that rival the sun and the moon and “the color of the weather,” and then — the absolute limit — the skin of the kingdom’s treasurer, a donkey that poops gold and jewels. But just as it looks as though Mother Goose will go Freudian, it’s Deneuve’s ultra-chic fairy godmother Delphine Seyrig (Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Last Year at Marienbad) to the rescue, airily lending out her magic wand (“I’ve got a spare”) and then whisking Deneuve, disguised as malodorous scullion “Donkey Skin,” to the neighboring Red Kingdom. Still to come are a crone who spits frogs, a talking rose, a singing parrot, a cat and bird bal masqué (complete with an orchestra of mice), a one-size-fits-one ring that will determine the fate of charming prince Jacques Perrin (future codirector of Winged Migration), and the most insouciant of wrap-ups. Jacques Demy’s adaptation of a 17th-century fable by Charles Perrault was his third musical after The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort — as well as a re-teaming with Deneuve and composer Michel Legrand (among the Demy lyrics he puts to music are a sales spiel for a finger-slenderizing elixir and a recipe for a cake d’amour) — and his most over-the-top in stylization, complete with dazzling picture-book costumes, servants and horses color-coded to the hues of their respective kingdoms, rampant anachronisms, and spectacular location shooting at the château of Chambord. In the three decades since its release, the negative of Demy’s most opulent film had become faded and worn, prompting his widow, filmmaker Agnès Varda, to oversee a new 35mm restoration of both picture and sound, using Legrand’s original stereo recordings to re-mix the soundtrack into Dolby SR for the very first time. This restoration reveals Demy’s fantasy in all its original splendor, what the International Herald Tribune called “a dazzler, an entrancingly beautiful film done with charm, delicacy, taste and high imagination.” “Exquisite. . . the film lasts in the memory, because it gives pleasure.” – Stanley Kauffmann.
A KOCH LORBER FILMS RELEASE
1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, 9:30