Review of Jacquot (1991) by Rob L — 24 Dec 2010

A charming, albeit unapologetically sentimental film from Varda, depicting her husband's youth in the Breton city from the years immediately prior to the Second World War through the Nazi occupation and into the postwar years.

Jacquot is a precocious youth obsessed with the cinema and eager to break free of his father's orbit (although the old man is far from an ogre). It's a blissful existence, despite the encroachment of the odd Nazi, and one could perhaps level accusations that the movie whitewashes the worst of the era. But, to a kid, it's likely that fantasy would have been uppermost in his mind in relation to reality, so such harping would be churlish. The film includes interviews with Demy (dying of AIDS at the time) and excerpts from his own films including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg .