MADE IN 1970 , in the wake of a brief but charm-breaking midcareer sojourn in Hollywood, Jacques Demy's Donkey Skin finds the director striving at least partly for the enchantment found in his earlier, more famous films. Yet this sun-dappled fairy-tale adaptation, drawn from Cinderella creator Charles Perrault, is also spiked with fun-puncturing irony and laced with a strong sense of the decay inherent in decadence. When Demy makes a shack in the forest briefly gleam like a diamond, it's hard to avoid thinking that no amount of jewel-encrusted fabulosity can cover up the sludge of the real world. Donkey Skin's pastoral scenery, animalistic themes, and fabulist perversity can be found in an exaggerated form in at least one derivative work, Walerian Borowczyk's 1975 The Beast. Though Demy is looking backward – at Jean Cocteau (whom a 17th-century fairy cites, along with Apollinaire, as a "poet of the future") in particular – he does so only to insert jarring anachronistic details into the resulting almost-too-pretty pictures. One scene looks like a Brueghel painting, another features a helicopter. Cocteau's muse and frequent star Jean Marais appears in Donkey Skin as an incestuous king, and the Beast from that director's Beauty and the Beast (1946) still has the visage and capriciousness of a spoiled tabby. It's a wry joke of Demy's that the only woman more beautiful than a red-haired Catherine Deneuve (as a queen) is a blond-haired Deneuve (as her daughter, who must flee a palatial domain clad in ass hide in order to find her destiny). Eastmancolor wasn't available, so Donkey Skin's royal cherry reds and berry blues aren't as immaculate and dominant as the pastels of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Which is exactly Demy's point: fantasy to the contrary, Mother Nature isn't easy to paint, or to tame. See Movie Clock for show times. (Johnny Ray Huston)