The Cinematheque Ontario guide’s introduction to the Jacques Demy retrospective, Bitter/Sweet, makes for interesting reading. Of the acclaimed French filmmaker James Quant writes, “Demy was too often treated as stylish and insubstantial, a director whose love of artifice and ornament resulted in an art of arabesque— operetta rather than verismo.” This program seems pitched as part celebration, part defence. As hinted in the Bitter/Sweet moniker, Demy’s films are exuberant, swooning displays of cinematic virtuosity on the surface, and sad stories about loss and regret underneath.

Demy’s first full-length feature, Lola (1961) is superficially different from the projects that would gain Demy his largest audience—it’s a low-key black and white drama strictly in the new wave style—but it establishes many of the themes that would recur throughout his filmography. Anouk Aimee plays the title character, a burlesque singer who longs for her lover, a sailor with whom she had a child. Lola introduces Demy’s fascination with lost love, and his recurring motif of the sailor.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) is Demy’s most famous film: a lavish musical that made Catherine Deneuve an international star. Her character, the daughter of a poor store owner, falls in love with a mechanic. Shortly after he joins the army, she finds out that she’s pregnant, and ends up marrying a rich man who has fallen in love with her.

All of the dialogue is sung, the music a little monotonous at times (heresy, I know), and it goes without saying that reading a French song subtitled can sometimes be a very depressing experience. At one point a woman is actually subtitled as singing, “The situation in which we find ourselves is such that we cannot, for the time being, take any rest.” Try dancing to that.

But The Umbrellas of Cherbourg sure looks great. It’s modelled after the MGM musicals of Vincent Minnelli, but it looks like it could also have been inspired by comic books. Pinks! Greens! Reds! Blues! Oranges! And that’s just the wallpaper. It is also strangely satisfying for its unusual air of melancholy. James Quandt notes in the Cinematheque guide, “everyone smilingly pretends to be content with second best,” part of Demy’s tendency to end his films with a feeling of “too-lateness.” The ending of Umbrellas is haunting stuff.

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), another musical of the MGM variety, places dialogue in between the singing. Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum picked Les Demoiselles as his all-time favourite musical, and if it can warm the heart of a sourpuss like Rosenbaum, it defi- nitely has something going for it.

The plot involves Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorleac as twin sisters, Danielle Darrieux as their mother, and a variety of love-struck men as their potential suitors, including, I kid you not, Gene Kelly. According to IMDb, Kelly is only dubbed about half the time, so if you’ve ever wanted to see Gene Kelly warble out a song in French, this is your chance.

Les Demoiselles is filled with bright colours, lush music, elaborate dance sequences, and a general atmosphere of pleasure and enjoyment. Demy’s direction is especially forceful, with impossibly fl uid crane and tracking shots on full display.

But if Les Demoiselles is sheer pleasure, Bay of Angels (1963) is the film that lingers on. It’s another black and white drama with a tone similar to the free-spiritedness of early Jean- Luc Godard. Jeanne Moreau and Claude Mann are young lovers, but spend most of their time in casinos because of Moreau’s gambling addiction. Mann wishes he could stop Moreau from gambling, but this is a difficult task, particularly when she’s winning big.

Though it ends a little too cleanly, Bay of Angels understands and effectively invokes the seductiveness of an addictive habit, in this case, gambling. When Mann tries to pry Moreau away from the roulette table, part of you wishes she would give up, but part of you wishes she would continue on. I mean, she was winning a few rounds ago, she was up $3,000; she’ll win it back the next round… yeah, the next round…

Cinimatheque’s Jacques Demy retrospective runs until March 16. Visit www.cinemathequeontario.ca for screening times.