Happily Ever After?
An adaptation of one of Charles Perrault’s lesser-known fairytales, Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin is a classic French musical that is equal parts dark and playfully surreal. Analysing the film’s subtle commentary on age-old romantic narrative tropes, JOANNA DI MATTIA explores its subversive undercurrents.
‘Have fairytale princesses all disappeared?’ the Blue King (Jean Marais) wonders. He’s looking for a new wife, and the portraits of women presented for him to choose from don’t meet his standards. ‘Sadness. Boredom. Pride,’ he declares, cataloguing their defects. It is only when the king is shown a final image, of his daughter, the princess (Catherine Deneuve), that his interest is aroused. ‘Who is she?’ he asks, unable to recognise her. Even when the prime minister (Sacha Pitoëff) informs the king of her identity, he’s undeterred from seeing her as a potential bride.
Before this transgressive darkness creeps into it, Jacques Demy’s (1970) begins with serene romance. Demy’s signature style is in full force. Like his most celebrated film, the recitative musical (1964), is saturated in colour: a bold palette of regal blues at the king’s palace; and later, at Prince Charming’s (Jacques Perrin) abode, black, white and shades of red. The film’s visual impact resides in its close attention to every aspect of mise en scène, from costume to production design, which can be described as spectacularly over the top. presents a true fantasy world with dissonant, unnerving elements that reveal its debts to Jean Cocteau’s surrealist retelling of (1946). The casting of Marais as monster resonates with Marais’ earlier role as the beast in Cocteau’s film. Demy also pays homage to that film by using live actors as statues, similarly opulent costuming and simple special effects. There is synergy in the shared isolation and confusion of each film’s protagonists and their ambiguously ‘happy’
