Jacquot de Nantes
Synopsis
Made in collaboration with Jacques Demy in the last year of his life, this is the first of Agnès Varda’s cinematic tributes to her longtime husband. The director crafts a docudrama retelling of Demy’s childhood, focusing on his growing vocation for cinema in these years.
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One would be hard-pressed to find a more poignant “cinematic love letter” than Jacquot de Nantes… A superb bildungsroman in its fictional sections, Jacquot achieves a deeper sense of reflection with strategic inserts from Demy’s films as well as intimate documents of Demy not long before his death in 1990.
Michael Joshua Rowin
November 02, 2016
The autobiography Demy never got to make for himself, toggling between Demy in his last days, re-enactments of his blessed childhood in Nantes, in and out of the cinema, and footage from his own ultra-romantic filmography, the film may just be the wisest and most fervent valentine one filmmaker ever made for another. Movieness it is.
Michael Atkinson
September 28, 2016
The narrative scenes play out mainly in black and white, but Varda shifts to color at unexpected moments, illustrating how Demy used his imagination to transform everyday life into the stuff of fantasy. She doesn’t let the latter upstage the former, however; her re-creations of French life during the Nazi occupation are precise and pointedly unsentimental.
Ben Sachs
May 23, 2013
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