Avis des critiques

The glories of Donkey Skin lie in the ruptures between the irresolvable conflicts brought on by inappropriate desire and the raptures of costume and production design, lighting and camera placement, melody and voice.

Donkey Skin is not just a challenge to fairy-tale traditions; Demy also uses it to build on the experimental fantasy work of Cocteau and his own previous films. The saturated colors and the operetta-like features of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), which make of the provincial town an unreal, magical space of love, anticipate Demy's use of color and the marvelous in Donkey Skin.

To qualify it as a minor work though seems a great disservice, as anyone who's seen the film knows there's nothing slight about it. It's required viewing for anyone remotely interested in understanding Demy, but even for those with simpler aims DONKEY SKIN is a willfully bizarre lark that rises above any "so bad it's good" pigeonholing.

The hyper-designed sets suggest a Cocteau-hour Disneyland (or maybe Demy checked out the Madonna Inn when he shot his previous film "The Model Shop" in Los Angeles)... Like Demy's other movies it's one of a kind, at once monstrously Oedipal and charmingly infantile; Deneuve managed to be both hilarious and touching in her donkey drag.

There's plenty of disguised sex in Donkey Skin. Perrin's prince is addressed by a very vaginal pink rose, the center of which talks at him with a woman's mouth and looks at him with a woman's eyes. When he's trying to find the Princess, he has all the maidens in the kingdom come try on a ring, and the phallic implications are clear.

Demy has the climactic wedding guests arrive on the palace lawn in a helicopter, an almost Alex Cox-ian jolt that suggests a subtle farcical program that suddenly becomes restless and explicit. In any case, the prescribed happy ending is difficult to take seriously relative to the images of Deneuve... groveling in the forest dirt wearing a musty pelt. Demy loved romantic naïveté, but he loved the wreckage of human whim just as much, and for him this chestnut harbored both in its shell.

It doesn't come off, despite a dazzling color design and imaginative sets, perhaps because Demy's extremely rarefied talent for fantasy needs to be anchored by a touch of the real.