Lola and Jackie
The return of Jacques Demy in black and white.

By Johnny Ray Huston

'LOLA IS SUCH a part of me that I can't tell which part is her and which part is me," Anouk Aimée says in the 1995 documentary The Universe of Jacques Demy, and more than 30 years after her starring role in Demy's first feature, Lola, some of the character's energetic mannerisms – a mischievous grin accompanied by sideways and downward glances – are still evident as she talks. Aimée can thank Demy that she doesn't view her identification with Lola as a curse. (She calls the role "a wonderful gift.") In the history of iconic movie Lolas, Demy's vision, embodied by Aimée, is a rare figure of hope: for von Sternberg and Fassbinder a woman named Lola instigates man's ruin; for Max Ophüls – cited in the credits of Demy's 1961 debut – the story of Lola Montès offers a way to say good-bye to cinema, love, and love of cinema.

For Demy, Lola is the heart of a romanticism that's optimistic and fatalistic – a vivid black-and-white romanticism that goes on to spout 1964's bleak primary-colorful Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in which the director literally paints the town red. (And 1967's pastel Young Girls of Rochefort, in which Lola's story reaches a severe resolution, offscreen.) When Lola's Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) returns in Umbrellas, he's accompanied by Michel Legrand's title theme from the earlier movie, a theme written for the woman he has lost. Now armed with the jewels he left Lola's narrative to acquire, he goes on to coldly claim Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) when her beloved is off at war. Faithfulness in the Demy universe isn't defined by sexual fidelity so much as steadfast anticipation of love's return: Lola's gracefully connected familial situations include Lola's seven-year (albeit highly eventful) wait for the father of her son and another mother's decade of self-enforced estrangement.

Between Lola and his third feature, Umbrellas, Demy rolled a lucky number two: 1963's noir twist Bay of Angels, an encapsulation of his philosophy. (A typical Demy irony: the plot of the movie, which was made while the director lacked the funds for Umbrellas, pivots on money.) In Bay of Angels gambling is love, and Jacqueline Demaistre (the already worn Jeanne Moreau) and Jean Fournier (Claude Mann, the type of cloudy-minded fawn Demy was fond of casting) place their bets together, albeit from different perspectives. An only child, Jean leaves the cramped tedium of his bank job and his home – where mother, not father, is absent, an anomaly in Demy's maternal universe – for the unpredictable vastness of beachside resort casinos. At the roulette wheel he meets up with Jackie, the bleach-blond extension of a burning Lucky Strike.

Lola and Jackie; one can assume Demy fully intended the then-contemporary celebrity significance of the latter name. If Aimée's Lola contrives to move in 12 directions at once – most of them away from other people's seriousness – Moreau's Jackie is ruthlessly direct. Slightly unhinged by a steady diet of scotch and strawberry ice cream, she steamrolls Jean's critical hesitance by acting on a pair of willful aphorisms: "What does it mean to 'know' somebody?" and "You must never let luck pass you by." Though Jackie's compulsion has a comic element – when broke, she plays with a toy roulette wheel – it's also far more serious than the addiction symptoms (headaches) she exhibits after a streak of bad bets. She has forfeited a wealthy husband and the custody of her three-year-old son.

It's tempting to ponder what tricks Gloria Grahame might have performed as Jackie. Never one to be associated with the term "fancy-free," the rumpled Moreau brings a nervous undercurrent to Jackie's impetuousness, a quality that Demy further emphasizes in the casino scenes' sound design: stretches of tense silence interrupted by the clatter of chips and the skitter of the ball across niches on a roulette wheel. These noises rarely sync up directly with an image; most often Demy focuses instead on the faces of the gamblers, who – however outlandish their attire – look grimly preoccupied rather than celebratory. "This display of flabby flesh makes me sick," Jackie says while on a stony beach. "I'd rather look at gamblers." So would Demy, though for different reasons. The economy of his approach encourages viewers to closely scrutinize a gambler's character.

Both Lola and Bay of Angels ambivalently examine a pensive younger man's fascination with an audacious older woman. If one accepts critic Jonathan Rosenbaum's assertion that Demy (a married father) was gay, those relationships take on added complexity. Lola and Jackie can be viewed as female portraits and as archetypes of uninhibited gay life. (I suspect that Demy's far-from-flighty identification with the feminine – his presumed lack of interest in "important themes" – partly accounts for the fact that, until recently, he hasn't received the respect accorded to some of his new-wave peers.) Demy's camera watches as these comparatively timid men – Roland in Lola, Jean in Bay of Angels – struggle with the behavior of the women they're attracted to, and that behavior may be the root of their attraction. Models of spontaneity, Lola and (especially) Jackie are also feather boa'd constrictors.

"Slut!" Jean spits at Jackie in Bay of Angels when she accepts another man's money to satisfy her betting urge; Demy manifests the pair's fates by way of a quicksilver motif – the rapid, flashy disappearance and reappearance of their reflections through a hallway of mirrored panels. In Lola a more everyday form of epiphany streams from Raoul Coutard's natural cinematography, which captures Roland's grave face in half-light as he tries not to flinch at Lola's casual disrespect, and shrouds Lola's hardened face in darkness as she lies to Roland. Lola appears to have a happy ending, but in fact its conclusion begins a series of diminishing romantic returns.

Bottle-blond sailors and beach boys share the screen with less-innocuous camp symbols (cigarette holders and jewelry) in Demy's first two films. Demy is best known for his vividly colored musicals, perhaps because prints and videos of Lola and Bay of Angels have been scarce; (re)discovering these earlier films reveals the bitterness beneath the candied surfaces of Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Young Girls of Rochefort. (Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark and François Ozon's upcoming Eight Women, both Deneuve-adorned, owe a stylistic debt to Demy, even if they trade his bittersweet humanity for postmodern mockery.) From the beginning of his career, this director recognized that how a person responds to – and moves on from – a defeated love defines his or her maturity, a process that involves the redefinition (some might say deterioration) of romance itself.

The motion in Demy's earliest emotion pictures is constantly shifting, riding Ophüls's carousels and Godard's convertibles to an unknown destination. At the start of Bay of Angels the camera looks back at Moreau's Jackie while it races forward with manic velocity. Lola also begins on an oceanside road, as the camera studies the oncoming scenery from behind the shoulder of a not-yet-identified speeding dandy. When the end arrives, the same car and camera angle propel two individuals and leave another behind. Perhaps Demy's outlook can be summarized by the proverb that introduces his very first feature: "Cry who will, laugh who can."

'Bay of Angels' opens Fri/29 at the Castro Theatre, S.F. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for show times. 'Lola' opens April 12 at the Lumiere Theatre, S.F. See Movie Clock, page 85, for show times.