Donkey Skin
1970, directed by Jacques Demy
The easiest thing one could say about Donkey Skin is that it’s a throwback to the classic age of French cinema, rekindling the spirit not only of fairy tales like Les visiteurs du soir and Beauty and the Beast but also a whole tradition of fantasy and surrealism. There’s certainly truth in that, but it would be a mistake to suppose that the film means to swing the pendulum backward after a decade of the Nouvelle vague‘s realism and formal experimentation. The real aim of Donkey Skin is altogether different, and the biggest clue to its purpose is the missing piece in its casting.
There’s a manifold symmetry to the characters of Donkey Skin. They belong to two kingdoms, one blue and one red, though the princess will cross over, and her godmother is the Lilac Fairy (whom we see changing once from yellow). There are also two generations, although Catherine Deneuve plays both the princess and her mother the Blue Queen. Moreover there are two sexes, so that the four principal characters will come to form two couples of different generations, though the Blue King spends much effort pursuing an incestuous match with his own daughter. The most revealing axis of symmetry, though, is the least obvious one – the actors are split in their origin between classic and modern French cinema.
Of the four principals, Jean Marais is a luminary of 1940s and 1950s French film, and he’s joined among the supporting cast by Micheline Presle and Fernand Ledoux (the Red Queen and King) as well as Henri Crémieux and voice narrator Jean Servais. In the other column, Catherine Deneuve and Delphine Seyrig are icons of newer French cinema, and the latter would become a staple of cutting edge 1970s European film. Prime and Second Ministers Sascha Pitoëff and Michel Delahaye are both associated with the New Wave, the former having played Seyrig’s husband in Last Year at Marienbad, and composer Michel Legrand is a major contributor to that movement.
The missing piece is the Red Prince. Jacques Perrin is a relative unknown, about 29 years old at the time of filming, so it would seem impossible to imagine that he could balance out the four leads as a representative of the classic period, except that he so closely resembles the great star Gérard Philipe, both in looks and bearing. Philipe had died young in 1959, so he was unavailable for Donkey Skin, though he would have turned 48 when the film was released, too old for the youthful prince. To see Perrin as a stand-in for Philipe, or to place any importance on their resemblance, may feel like a compromise, but as we’ve noted the web of symmetries is broken with anomalies on every level. The optimal thing is not to balance everything neatly, but to erect a framework that the audience can sense intuitively, while remaining true to the complications of real life.
One thing is surprising about the two marriages at the end. If Donkey Skin is in any way a comment on the relationship between classic and modern French cinema, the obvious thing would be to split the representative characters along the generational axis, between old and young. Instead, the two men represent the classical era while the two women, Seyrig and Deneuve, represent modern film. This rearrangement is a refutation of François Truffaut, for whom the French New Wave was a generational rebellion against la qualité française. Rather, Demy’s film posits a romance between the two schools of filmmaking, a happy joining of differences that fit together like the ring on the princess’s finger. Both types of cinema are needed to complete the richness of the French tradition.
It’s fitting, then, that in its journey toward synthesis, the fairy tale is also a story of growing up. The thankfully unconsummated courtship between the Blue King and his daughter, in which the princess alternates between reluctance and willingness, describes the state of immaturity in Freudian theory, just as there’s something akin to oedipal rebellion in Truffaut’s rage against the established cinema of the older generation. The attraction to one parent brings an equal and opposite reaction against the other, hence the derogatory term cinéma de papa. Donkey Skin aims to put that childish attitude of rebellion to rest.
Each couple at the end, therefore, represents a union of traditional and modern cinema. The younger couple forms the main story, as the present state of cinema is the more immediate concern, but the wedding of the Blue King and Lilac Fairy, whose relationship underwent some unspecified turbulence in the past, implies that both kinds of cinema have long coexisted and belonged together. The personification itself is another homage to tradition, as allegory was so important to the cinema of the Nazi Occupation. Allegory has historically been a voice for the oppressed, as well as a medium for unpopular ideas – including Donkey Skin‘s reconciliation of modern and traditional cinema.
The donkey is the film’s most allegorically suggestive image. When the princess, after demanding and trying on three glamorous dresses, smears her face with dirt and puts on the donkey hide, she debases herself as French cinema itself was “debased” in the transition from fancy studio productions to the gritty realism of the French New Wave. Second, one of the most revered modernist/realist French films (which came from outside the Nouvelle vague) was Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, with a donkey at its center. Demy had contemplated filming Donkey Skin since before Bresson’s film, but he could still have made use of the connection. Third, despite the New Wave’s modest production methods, its international popularity doubtless made it a cash cow for French culture, like the donkey that shits coins and precious gems.
As the princess turns into a scullery maid while retaining her magic wand and wardrobe, she comes to straddle the dualities of fantasy and realism, of high and low-brow culture, of tradition and modernism. Fleeing her father’s castle, her elegant carriage turns into a peasant’s cart, and soon she’s the subject of popular scorn, much like how the masses may sneer at experimental cinema. In the cake baking song she splits physically so that her two identities can show off their harmony, working together and completing each other’s sentences. On top of the difference between established tradition and scrappy avant-garde, there’s an implied class disparity between the princess in her gown and the same person dressed as a donkey, but here they reverse roles, the scullery maid giving directions while her royal persona does the manual work of cooking. Demy goes further than most modernist directors would dare in respecting tradition, but he also suggests that modernity should take the lead. Accordingly, the female characters in Donkey Skin are unmistakably stronger than the males.
Jacques Demy was neither a central nor a typical member of the French New Wave, but he was usually grouped with the movement’s “Left Bank” wing, and his wife Agnès Varda was a sort of bridge, stylistically and socially, between the Right and Left Bank factions. Donkey Skin pays homage to Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, especially in the witch who spits frogs from her mouth, but in general its modernist gestures are less conspicuous than its retro qualities. By filming on real locations instead of studio sets, it adopts the realist shooting method of the New Wave, in contrast to its magical imagination. Otherwise the film’s seemingly conservative style serves to offset the anachronistic shock of the helicopter at the end.
The helicopter confirms that the film’s sympathies are as much with the new as with the old, but it’s neither the first nor the most telling anachronism. Much earlier, when the king first begins to court his daughter, he reads to her from the poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau. “I have some poems from the future. The ancients wrote well, but the poets of tomorrow may delight you more.” Here, in Jean Marais’s speech, the film simultaneously acknowledges its respect for the past and its faith in the creativity of the future. By 1970 both those poets were dead, and as a film director Cocteau had already taken his place in the classical canon of French cinema, so that the king’s line should remind us how arbitrary and impermanent the labels of “old”, “new”, “traditional”, and “avant-garde” really are.
CONNECTIONS:
The Wizard of Oz – Musical fairy tale with witches, a wizard, dwarves, one or two castles, and a young woman fleeing her home; female characters stronger than the male characters
Lumière d’été – Elaborate birdcage in the archetypal form of the building it’s inside of
Beauty and the Beast – Living statues inside a castle; deer sculptures; magical rose; slow motion for magical effect
Such a Pretty Little Beach – Melding of French traditions of fantasy and realism
Late Spring – Reminder that tradition and modernism are not opposites but rather shifting parts of a long continuum
Cléo from 5 to 7 – Person spitting frogs from the mouth; broken mirror; glass incubator or coffin
Band of Outsiders – Allegory about the dual strains of traditionial and modernist cinema in France
Au hasard Balthazar – Donkey as a central image, with a connotation of humility