Une chambre en ville (1982)
Directed by Jacques Demy

Film Review

Une chambre en ville was Jacques Demy's last great achievement but it was a film which he long wanted to make, as far back as the late 1950s, when the spectacle of a violent showdown between striking workers and riot police in his home town of Nantes was vividly imprinted on his mind.  It was not until the mid-1970s that Demy had the confidence to make the film, although his plans were derailed after a catastrophic falling out with the actors he had chosen for the lead roles - Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu - who insisted that they should sing all their dialogue.  In each of the three musicals she had made for Demy prior to this, Deneuve had been dubbed by a professional singer and was unwilling to repeat the experience; Demy's refusal to acquiesce resulted in a lasting rift between Deneuve and the director who had made her an international star.  As Demy's career declined throughout the rest of the decade, it must have seemed that his pet project would never see the light of day.  It was whilst making the television film La Naissance du jour (1980) that Demy's enthusiasm for Une chambre en ville was rekindled, now that he had found the ideal actress to play the lead role of Edith - the stunning ex-model turned actress Dominique Sanda.

Une chambre en ville differs from Demy's earlier musicals in one important respect: it is anchored in the grim reality of everyday life and has none of the kitsch artificiality that saturates every frame of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967).  The more sombre tone of the film reflects not just the tragic nature of the story, a modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet, but the mood of the era in which it is set, a time of social unrest and class division.  As in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, every line of dialogue is set to music, although Michel Colombier's score has a very different quality to that supplied by Michel Legrand on Demy's first three musicals - far darker, far more subdued.  In contrast to the wistful melancholia of Cherbourg and the ebullient optimism of Rochefort, the music of Une chambre en ville is drenched in an oppressive aura of hopeless fatalism.   We know how the film will end from the very first scene, an ominous standoff between defiant strikers and baton-wielding police.  The uplifting romanticism of Demy's early films is replaced by something much grittier, a gloomy admission that true love is experienced only fleetingly, if ever, in this world of ours.   Now that it has been revealed that Demy pursued various homosexual love affairs (whilst being married to Agnès Varda), the film acquires perhaps a deeper significance, shedding more light on its director than was apparent when it was first seen in 1982.

The casting may not be quite as glitzy as in Demy's previous musicals but the absence of a hyper-charismatic star is no bad thing, allowing the film to have a greater sense of reality and truth.  Danielle Darrieux is the biggest name in the cast list, and the only member of the cast to sing her own dialogue, but her performance is suitably restrained.  Richard Berry makes an effective contrast with Dominique Sanda, both actors bringing an intense carnal realism to their passionate on-screen liaison, very different to the tame billing and cooing seen in previous Demy films.  Michel Piccoli imbues his portrayal of the rejected husband with menace and poignancy, becoming utterly terrifying in the film's most shocking sequence when he attacks Sanda with a cut-throat razor, whilst Jean-François Stévenin does a good job of ennobling the ordinary working man, resolute in his beliefs and implacably decent.

Judging by the enthusiastic reaction it received from the critics, Une chambre en ville should have been the film which revitalised interest in Demy's work.  The film was nominated for nine Césars in 1983 (including Best Film and Best Director), but it failed to win a single award.  The cinemagoing public appeared to be singularly unimpressed by the film, which ended up being a monumental flop.  It is hard to account for the film's failure - it is assuredly one of Demy's most assured and mature works, more substantial than his early musicals and more relevant to contemporary society.  Most likely it was the downbeat mood of the film that put off audiences, a mood that was completely out-of-synch with the renewed spirit of optimism that had broken out in France following the election of François Mitterand as President.  Whatever the reason, the failure of Une chambre en ville came as a bitter blow to Demy, a setback from which he would never recover.  Even today, the film is all too easily overlooked, often dismissed as an unsuccessful attempt to combine two ill-fitting genres, social realism and musical.  Yet, whilst it may lack the crowd-pulling appeal of those early Hollywood-inspired musicals of Demy, Une chambre en ville is unquestionably a daring experiment in cinematic form, and possibly the most honest and revealing of all Demy's films.

Film Synopsis

Nantes, during the workers' strike of 1955.  One of the strikers is François Guilbaud, a steel worker who rents a room in the apartment of Margot Langlois, a bourgeois widow who opposes the strike.  One day, François sees a beautiful young woman dressed only in a mink coat and, thinking she is a prostitute, takes her to bed.  He then discovers that she is Edith Leroyer, his landlady's rebellious daughter.  Tired of being beaten and bullied by her impotent husband Edmond, Edith plans to leave town and start a new life elsewhere, hoping that François will join her.  Even though he has managed to get another girl pregnant, François is ready to elope with Edith, but first he must lend his support to a strikers' demonstration...