the princess who hits the jackpot
by
Douglas Messerli
Jacques
Demy (screenplay, based on a story by Charles Perrault), Jacques Demy
(director) Peau d'Âne (Donkey Skin) / 1970
Although
Jacques Demy’s film, Donkey Skin, is
very little known in this country, it was a large hit in France, where the
story’s originator, Charles Perrault is highly beloved. Like that poet’s
“Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella,” “Donkey Skin” is a tale about a young woman
who must be transformed before she might receive her reward of the handsome
prince. Like “Cinderella,” the prince is able to track her down, in this case
with a ring which she has embedded in a cake, rather that a golden slipper, and
like that other work, in this case, the young princess has a fairy godmother
protecting her.
Yet Demy’s version is far more
transgressive than many other versions. Unlike the magical love tales such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, this
Michel Legrand collaboration concerns a far more problematic kind of love: the
incestuous love of a king for his daughter. And the fairy aunt (Delphine
Seyrig), who absolutely loves the color lilac (a blue mixed with just a hint of
red), might just as well be a gay fairy attempting to outwit the film’s fixated
king (Jean Marais) so that, at the very last moment, (s)he might helicopter in
to marry him.
Despite his long marriage to fellow
film-maker Agnès Varda, Demy was also gay (he died of AIDS), and the musical,
in this case, is often a loving send-up of Demy’s fellow gay filmmaker, Jean
Cocteau, paralleling many scenes and techniques of Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (including using
Marais, who appeared in that film) and later referencing Cocteau’s Orpheus when the charming prince
(Jacques Perrin) comes up with his nose against a protective mirror surrounding
the princess’ (played by his Umbrellas of
Cherbourg actress, Catherine Deneuve) hut.
A bit like the American political
landscape, the reigning groups of this tale are divided up between the blue and
the red; however we must remember that these are central colors also in France’s
flag, so that the fact that the princess is born into the blue to be wooed by
the red prince, should not be given too much credence; yet it does hint of a
kind of Romeo and Juliet-like romance; and that, in turn, lends this fragile story
a bit more depth. If nothing else, the young beauty has been forced to escape her
own father and kingdom hidden in the skin of her father’s favorite ass (who
happens also to be the secret to his father’s financial success).
But even here, Demy further satirizes the
original, by allowing the now scullery maid (hired mostly to clear out the
pigsty) to take along the three dresses she has demanded from her father, one
defining spring weather, a second celebrating the moon, and the third radiating
gold like sun. In short, this Cinderella ain’t so very bad off as it appears.
And the rather effete, certainly foppish “charming 
prince” who catches a glimpse
of her dressed in the sun-based dress, might almost be a kind of closet-fashion
admirer; after all, he’s utterly bored (much like the princess’ father) with
seeking out a princess to marry, and even leaves a celebration to wander off
into the forest wherein he discovers this beauty.
Accordingly, there is a very campish
element to this tale, which I’m certain accounted for some of its 2 million and
more sales in France. Yet, as in nearly all Demy films, there is a lightness
and grace to Donkey Skin—despite its
absurd circumstances—that allows us to fall in love with its myths permitting
us to bathe happily in Legrand’s Broadway theater-like songs. Why this film was
never turned into a stage musical I simply can’t explain. Perhaps the movie is
just that, a kind stage musical captured on film.
Whatever, I’m a big lover of Demy’s
outrageously beautiful film fantasies, even when the princess, to escape her
father’s lust, must hide out in his ass.
Los Angeles, March
23, 2018
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (March
2018).
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