Donkey Skin
Koch Lorber, $34.98
In 1694, three years prior to the publication of his Tales of Mother Goose, which set into stone folkloric hand-me-downs “Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” Charles Perrault donned “Donkey Skin.” In verse. Chateau Ussé, his inspiration for “Sleeping Beauty” – not to mention the logo of said maiden’s most famous patron, Disney – still stands in France’s Loire Valley, and Chambord, crown castle in that same valley of the kings, would house Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin nearly 300 years after Perrault’s sovereign, Louis XIV, made his retreats there. A DVD extra to this hallucinatory 1971 fantasy marks those centuries with a wealth of kaleidoscope illustrations retelling the fairy tale.Commanded by Beauty and the Beast monarch Jean Marais, Donkey Skin opens with the king’s “banker,” a barnyard beast whose fertilizer is gold – literally. Hearing French schoolchildren titter over this particular plot point in another DVD bonus smacks of Demy’s restorationist widow, Agnes Varda, a cinematic jewel in her own right. (Look for Jim Morrison lounging on the film’s set in an excerpt from Varda’s tantalizing The World of Jacques Demy.) The king’s other prize booty is Catherine Deneuve, playing both the dying queen who forces from her mate a death-bed vow to marry only someone as radiant as she, and also the couple’s sole offspring. When the king’s affections turn to the glowing princess, the Fairy of Lilacs Delphine Seyrig, spinning heads with Deneuve, demands three wedding gifts: a dress the color of weather (“What kind of weather?” “Good weather!”); another the color of the moon (“Now he’s asking for the moon,” grumbles the King’s tailor); and one the color of the sun. “Those unbelievable heavy dresses,” recalls their model, coming as close as she ever would to being eclipsed by wardrobe.
Giving into these stalling tactics, the king acquiesces to the blondes’ final ransom, enabling Deneuve’s escape to the red kingdom as scullion Peau D’ane, “Donkey Skin.” Enter the prince and most of Michel Legrand’s confectioner’s score, which served Demy and Deneuve famously on The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. Blue dwarves, an old hag coughing up toads, and the cake of love sequence, all in dazzlingly restored hues, spells Donkey Skin, French kids’ equivalent of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. On mescaline.
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The Phantom of Liberty (Criterion): Luis Buñuel’s Belle du Jour and Tristana, Catherine Deneuve, is nowhere to be seen in this French absurdist dominoing of non sequiturs from 1974, the surrealist master’s second to last film.This article appears in May 20 • 2005.
