- Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy
by Anne E. Duggan
Wayne State University Press, 2013.
208 pp.; $29.95.
Jacques demy’s place in cinema history remains a source of scholarly debate. Whether seen as a peripheral figure to the French New Wave,1 a bridge between that cinematic tradition and the historically devalued Tradition of Quality,2 or an auteur whose consistent cinematic worldview revealed a magical and observant perspective on life,3 Demy is a polarizing figure. As a result, his films met with varying degrees of commercial and financial success. Audiences approached such projects as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), and Donkey Skin (1970) with relative enthusiasm, and the latter remains a favorite fairy tale film of French children. Michel Legrand’s scores and Demy’s bold use of color and unconventional narrative strategies in these films keep them relevant in cinéphilic history. In contrast, his more troubling and less widely distributed films, like The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1972), Lady Oscar (1979), and A Room in Town (1982), divided audiences. Although Jacques Demy remains a respected filmmaker, there exist large, undiscussed gaps in the scholarship on his cinema.
Anne E. Duggan seeks to fill some of these gaps by addressing two crucial aspects of Demy’s filmmaking in Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy. The book unites three areas that Duggan sees as intrinsically connected: Jacques Demy’s filmmaking aesthetic, queer theory, and fairy tale studies. Scholarly discussions of queer sensibilities in Demy’s films remain underdeveloped, something Duggan is intent on rectifying. Demy’s films had a profound influence on French gay audiences and filmmakers, and it is the “queerness” of his films that sets Demy apart, in Duggan’s eyes, from his French New Wave contemporaries (6). Duggan constructs an inclusive framework of queer theory to support her claims, drawing on Alexander Doty’s methods for widely defining queerness, Chris Straayer’s discussion of nonnormative heterosexual practices, and Steven Angelides’s concept of a broader [End Page 81] theoretical category for the “sexually marginalized.”4 Some scholars may judge Duggan’s definitions of queer characters and relationships to be too broad and inclusive, blurring the lines between queer studies and other disciplines. But Demy’s characters are complex and multivalent, Duggan argues, and her casting of a wide theoretical net allows her to emphasize the similar ways in which Demy’s narratives address tensions over gender, sexual, and class identities. A similarly broad discussion of fairy and folk tales permits Duggan to explore the various ways that Demy draws on these stories to explore and challenge conventional understandings of class, sexuality, and gender through his cinematic “queer enchantments” (4).
Demy’s repeated evocation of fairy tales “serves as a structuring device that facilitates a wide intertextual blending of literary and filmic references” (11). Duggan provides rigorous and extensive textual analysis to situate Demy’s films alongside the previous iterations (in literature and film) of the fairy tales he references. She astutely points out that these films’ complexities are better understood when placed within the larger context of Demy’s cinematic oeuvre. As such, Duggan compares a narrow selection of Demy’s films—Lola (1961), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Donkey Skin, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Lady Oscar—to the fairy and folk tales they evoke. This comparison pinpoints the moments where Demy’s versions deviate from the tales that inspired them to ultimately propose “a much more ambivalent notion of dream and fantasy” that reveals the “problematic underpinnings of many classical fairy-tale narratives” (143).
Some of Duggan’s most compelling contributions are her extended historical discussions of the origins of the stories about the Pied Piper and the Rose of Versailles, contexts that have received little critical attention in existing work on folk tales in literature and film. Demy’s version of “The Pied Piper” draws on the Franco-American tradition of the original tale—one that emphasizes the tensions...