A glorious world: how Jacques Demy made his own cinematic universe
The French New Wave was a radical time for cinema, with filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut emerging to instant acclaim. Using unconventional techniques, such as breaking the fourth wall, jumpcuts, on-location shooting and handheld filming, they transformed cinema. While the French New Wave stood in opposition to the mainstream, these directors were still greatly influenced by many elements of classic Hollywood.
Jacques Demy is slightly less appreciated within the French New Wave as opposed to his contemporaries, perhaps because he really leaned into his Hollywood influences. Yet, the result was a glorious mix of fantasy and realism, with Demy taking from classic stories and giving them his own experimental spin. After making a few short films in the 1950s and even cameoing in The 400 Blows as a police officer, he made his feature debut with Lola in 1961.
The film starred Anouk Aimée as the eponymous character, a dancer who attracts the attention of several men. An old acquaintance tries to reconnect with her and a sailor attempts to win her over, but the charming Lola is only interested in one man – her former lover, despite the fact he left her after he got her pregnant many years before. It’s a complex film, one that moves between joyousness and heartbreak, introducing Demy as a fantastic filmmaker. He infused the movie with many references to American cinema, yet it hardly feels like a Hollywood-ised French film.
However, Demy soon did something that Hollywood would come to popularise in the following years, making the French filmmaker somewhat of a pioneer. Lola marked the start of the Jacques Demy Cinematic Universe by introducing us to characters that subsequently cropped up in his next films, often mentioning a character they interacted with in a previous movie as an easter egg for fans. Thus, these stand-alone films become connected, allowing audiences to potentially find hidden meaning or context within them through the addition of specific characters or Demy’s choice to reuse locations.
Demy was not the first to make a cinematic universe, but he was certainly an early practitioner of the idea. The Universal Classic Monsters movies are generally considered to be the first real cinematic universe, with the same specific monsters appearing in different movies made by Universal, beginning in the ‘30s.
Still, before we had Marvel, DC and even Star Wars cinematic universes, we had Demy. In 1969, eight years after the events of Lola, Aimée reunited with Demy to play the same character in Model Shop. In Lola, she ends up with Michel, her old flame, but in Model Shop, it is revealed that Michel is now with Jackie, Jeanne Moreau’s character from Bay of Angels, Demy’s second film.
Then we have Roland from Lola, who desperately tries to get with Aimée’s character, making an appearance in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Demy’s most well-known movie. The gorgeous musical sees Roland now setting his sights on Genevieve, the leading female character played by Catherine Deneuve. They get married after Roland recounts the plot of Lola to her, partly down to the advice of Genevieve’s mother, who thinks he would make for a good husband.
There are other, less obvious connections, such as the mention of Aimé, a barber who appears in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and turns out to be the father of the young girl, Cécile, in Lola. With references to certain songs, locations and characters, Demy makes each film feel extra personal and full of love for his craft, inviting audiences to draw connections and immerse themselves in his glorious world.
