‘Donkey Skin’: Jacques Demy’s twisted fairytale
From Angela Carter’s dark take on classic fairy tales to the various gothic and surreal cinematic interpretations of beloved stories like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, there is something wonderful to be found in twisting a well-known story into something magical, bizarre, and otherworldly. Jacques Demy certainly championed his love for aesthetics and slight surrealism when it came to Donkey Skin, or Peau D’ane, which took Charles Perrault’s 1695 fairytale and turned it into a visual and musical feast, both mind-bending and evocative.
The filmmaker, who rose to prominence in the 1960s with his French New Wave film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring Catherine Deneuve, was always a little different from his contemporaries. The movie borrowed heavily from classical Hollywood musicals while retaining a uniquely experimental and European essence, with Demy revealing his love for telling a moving story through unconventional means. With Donkey Skin, released in 1970, the filmmaker recruited Deneuve for another unusual take on romance and freedom, although this time he crafted a world with an atmosphere that few have come close to emulating ever since.
Deneuve plays a princess who is subjected to her father’s advances when her mother dies, with the king believing that she would be the only viable option to keep his wife’s beauty alive. Wanting to reproduce with his daughter, the horrified princess talks to her fairy godmother, played by Delphine Seyrig, who sings a song about the dangers of incest. The pair then devise a plan to help the princess escape and be free of her lecherous father, which involves her donning the skin of his lucky donkey and running away.
The movie is as bizarre as it sounds, with brightly-painted sets boasting a gorgeous ‘60s medieval revival style, as do the beautiful costumes, like Seyrig’s lilac fairy outfit and Deneuve’s luminescent dresses. With various musical numbers and immaculate detail paid to every visual, Demy carved out a world so far-removed from our own, offering up a fever dream that isn’t exactly nightmarish but isn’t totally idyllic, either.
There are humans standing in as statues, a helicopter coming down at the end of the film in one big anachronism, and musicians dressed in papier-mache pig masks. Donkey Skin is the gift that keeps on giving; everytime you enter its strange and colourful world, you’ll find it hard to leave.
The movie was a huge source of inspiration for Anna Biller’s The Love Witch, which pays homage to Demy’s film through the wedding scene. She told Criterion, “I think the formula Jacques Demy uses, which is combining this beautiful, magical fairytale world with very dark and very realistic psychological material is something I use as a template for my own work.” That’s exactly what makes Donkey Skin such a special film. On the surface, it’s this gorgeous world of over-the-top decor and even slightly camp design choices, but this all works in favour of contrasting the dark and twisted elements of the story.
By placing themes of incest and the need to escape alongside pretty colours and surreal cinematic choices, Demy highlights the innate strangeness of the predicament facing the princess. She might be royalty living in a supposedly fairy tale world, but the reality of her situation is much more bleak, so Demy emphasises this by using uncanny devices. With a great performance from Deneuve, Donkey Skin remains one of Demy’s most enthralling yet underrated films.
