Cine wanderer: Jacques Demy in Nantes

A couple of years ago, while on a trip to Normandy for a birthday party, I persuaded my friends to make a stop at Cherbourg, the French port town immortalised in Jacques Demy’s candy-coloured musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). The visit was a special one. I couldn’t help but feel giddy at discovering the plaques that commemorate the shooting locations; the film was clearly a point of pride for the locals. Everywhere I looked, Demy’s magic was evident. Here was a town where nothing seemed to happen; we could hear the sound of our own footsteps ricocheting off the empty cobbled streets. Yet, through Demy’s eyes, the loneliness of such a place was paired with the intense idealisation of first love, a heartbreaking juxtaposition that complicates the supposed blandness of provincial living.

Demy was drawn to other coastal towns apart from Cherbourg for his films, such as Rochefort and Nice, transitory spaces where chance encounters and missed connections occur. But the location that seems to have captured his heart the most is Nantes, the former capital of Brittany where he spent his formative years sheltering from the bombings during World War II, working at his father’s garage and frequenting little cine-clubs, a childhood marked by both tragedy and tranquillity. The city might not be his birthplace, but this was certainly where Jacques Demy the director was born.

Steeped in melancholy and nostalgia, his debut Lola (1961) was shot entirely on location in Nantes, marking a poignant homecoming for the filmmaker a little over a decade after his move to Paris at the age of 18. Following Roland (Marc Michel), a listless daydreamer who would later return in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the romantic drama is dedicated to Max Ophuls but also doubles as a tribute to the city of Demy’s youth where reality and fantasy meet.

While Roland pines for Lola (Anouk Aimée), a childhood friend who has become a seductive cabaret performer, his unattainable object of desire still carries a torch for Michel (Jacques Harden), her first love and the father of her child. In a place populated with American sailors passing through, these wandering souls are destined to be in each other’s orbit for a fleeting moment, as they chase after the mirage of contentment.

Reflecting this yearning state of mind, Raoul Coutard’s magnificent camerawork is constantly on the move, bouncing from the sleepy harbours and bustling shops of Passage Pommeraye to the roving clientele who frequent Lola’s nightclub, the interiors of which were shot inside the elegant brasserie La Cigale. In between temporary loves, there still remains a chance for genuine connection. Strolling with Lola through the shopping arcade’s long, mesmerising walkways, Roland tenderly confides that there is also happiness in wanting happiness. Like Demy in his teenage years, the young man dreams of the faraway adventures he’s seen in flashy Hollywood movies. Nevertheless, Nantes is not portrayed as a land of crushed dreams; instead it has a restless aura, fuelled by its hopes for the future.

Released more than 20 years after his debut, Une chambre en ville (1982) casts Nantes in a darker, politically fervent light. Set during a historic strike led by local metalworkers in 1955, a movement joined by Demy’s relatives, the film also has its ensemble cast sing their dialogue in the style of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967).

Opening on a heated stand-off between nonviolent protesters and the volatile police, Une chambre en ville is markedly more fatalistic in its romanticism. In contrast to Roland in Lola, shipyard worker François (Richard Berry) is an idealist with a cause. Much to the chagrin of his bourgeois landlady Margot (Danielle Darrieux), François spends his days and nights picketing with his comrades. To make matters even more awkward, he falls in love with Margot’s rebellious daughter Edith (Dominique Sanda), who roams the streets naked in her fur coat as revenge against her brutish husband Edmond (Michel Piccoli). Mirroring these layers of oppression, which range from labour exploitation and state brutality to marital abuse, the Nantes of Une chambre en ville is largely shot at night; it is no longer the sun-drenched haven we see in Lola.

Even the Passage Pommeraye goes through a transformation. The freewheeling camera movement of Lola gives way to more static shots showing Edith gingerly walking down the wooden staircase to enter Edmond’s TV shop, where she is surrounded by flickering monitors on all sides. Lined up with green curtains and wallpaper, this colourful touch harks back to Demy’s musical classics such as Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, but the effect is decidedly sinister. In the grip of patriarchal and capitalist cruelty, the possibility of escape is non-existent. In Lola the return of the past can bring about catharsis, but no such release exists in the world of Une chambre en ville. Here, both political and emotional eruptions are bound by death. Mixing documentary and fiction, Jacquot de Nantes (1991), Agnès Varda’s heartbreaking portrait of her late husband’s life and artistic career, opens with Demy revisiting the beaches of his youth. As he grabs a handful of sand, the tiny grains gently slip through his f ingers, slivers of time passed. It’s a delicate gesture that brings to mind Demy’s gentle attempts in Lola and Une chambre en ville to hold on to his childhood in Nantes and its kaleidoscopic charm. To him, it was a city full of beauty, sadness and, of course, the capacity for revolution. A city of departures and arrivals where every minute can hold a lifetime of memories.