The Cinematheque

“Demy cuts sweet with acid, love with horror. The audacity of the thing stuns … He injects a peculiar fearlessness, an Olympian smile at the ways of life.”

Donald Lyons, Film Comment

In Une chambre en ville, Jacques Demy’s only fully sung film after The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a metalworkers strike opens up a space of unmarked time, in which engagements, families, love, and labour all turn from assumptions and requirements to sites of possible change. François (Richard Berry) is one of the thousands of striking workers in Nantes, Demy’s childhood hometown. He finds himself the unexpected nexus of crisscrossing fate for, among others, his long-term amour, his best friend, his landlady, and a woman looking to leave her abusive husband. If Umbrellas tugged apart a picture-perfect image of first love, Demy’s return to the genre strikes a harsher tone—love’s timing is just as unkind, but the sources of pain and sadness are closer to the surface. Demy treats all this material with infinite tenderness, his trust in the expressive potential of colour and colloquial lyricism evident in every scene.

In French with English subtitles

“Rapturously romantic … Une chambre en ville survives as a darkly magnificent farewell to Demy’s unique and enchanting world.”

David Melville, Senses of Cinema

“It’s hard to think of anything quite like it—Une chambre en ville​’s story, setting, style, and intensity are very different from those of other film musicals … [The film] is more ambitious and more personal than anything else Demy made.”

Geoff Andrew, The Criterion Collection