Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy by Anne E. Duggan (review)

Anne Duggan’s Queer Enchantments is an innovative reading of Jacques Demy’s cinema in relationship to the fairy tale and an analysis of how that relationship contributes to a queer sensibility and camp aesthetic that distinguishes Demy from other French New Wave auteurs; it also opens up new possibilities for our understanding of the fairy tale. Attending to both the fairy tale and melodramatic film from the perspective of genre—as opposed simply to narrative and thematic content—Duggan illustrates how the two simultaneously collaborate with and challenge each other in Demy’s fairy-tale films to generate productive spaces for his multidimensional social critiques, which she interprets within and against the historical backdrop of post–World War II France. Throughout, Duggan returns to the conjoined questions of what the fairy tale might tell us about Demy’s films and what Demy’s films might tell us about the fairy tale. As such, Queer Enchantments fills the scholarly lacunae that result from a critical tendency to overlook or ignore the importance of the fairy tale to Demy’s oeuvre in particular and to film history more generally, and from the marginalization of queer theory in fairy-tale studies.

In four richly detailed and insightful chapters that focus on Lola (1961), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Donkeyskin (1970), The Pied Piper (1972), and Lady Oscar (1979), Duggan significantly expands current scholarship on fairy tales and film, which tends toward considerations of filmic adaptations and the implications of such adaptations for fairy-tale studies. Duggan’s extensive and nuanced close readings, on the other hand, are grounded in formal analysis. By privileging film as a medium, Duggan goes well beyond typical scholarly discussions of fairy-tale films that understand them simply as contemporary versions of tales and, as a result, center on questions of narrative and thematic adaptation without addressing the cultural and theoretical work that film itself might facilitate.

In her chapter on Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, for example, Duggan discusses Demy’s strategic use of color to intensify each film’s relationship to melodrama and thus its cultural messages about fairy-tale dreams and the realities of oppressive gender constraints; at the same time, Duggan argues, color also emphasizes the gradual process of capitulation to social norms in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and the ways such submission renders women invisible. More specifically, Duggan points out that as Geneviève slowly consents to her mother’s pressures to conform to hegemonic ideals, the color of her clothing clashes less and less with her mother’s clothing and environment until they are represented through the same palette. In one particularly telling scene, the pattern of Geneviève’s dress perfectly matches the wallpaper in her mother’s home, rendering her completely invisible. Along these lines, Duggan further suggests that the claustrophobia of French bourgeois society—a central theme in both of these films and one that Demy chafes against in all of the films in Duggan’s archive—is represented by Demy’s use of “iris-in” and “iris-out” (17) to tightly frame and contain the action in Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Color, music, temporality (represented through slow and accelerated motion), technical framing shots (iris-in and iris-out, the creation of proscenium arches through long shots), and character staging in relation to props are just a few of the formal qualities that Duggan reads in relation to each film’s thematic content and Demy’s specific sociopolitical and historical critique.

Although Duggan’s persuasive and exciting readings of Demy’s fairy-tale cinema make up the heart of Queer Enchantments, the book also delves more deeply into a wider set of theoretical and cultural questions through an impressive attention to Demy’s layered intertextualities. Intertextuality in Demy’s cinema is cyclical and multilayered, and Duggan does an excellent job of excavating and articulating...