Nice ass Jacques Demy’s Peau d’âne was ahead of its time BY A.S. HAMRAH
	Peau d’âne/Donkey Skin Directed by Jacques Demy. Written by Demy from a tale by Charles Perrault. Music by Michel Legrand. With Catherine Deneuve, Jean Marais, Jacques Perrin, Delphine Seyrig, and Micheline Prelse. In French with English subtitles. A Koch Lorber Films release (100 minutes). All week at the Brattle Theatre.

With its horses painted blue or red and Catherine Deneuve clad half the time in the unlined skin of a flayed burro, Jacques Demy’s 1970 musical fairy tale Peau d’âne probably won’t win the affection of the PETA crowd. This charming and inventive movie may not please advocates of the rights of little people, either, since it features the diminutive actors who played the Oompa-Loompas in the 1971 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory painted blue to match the horses. Castle servants, they scurry around the film’s edges rescuing cakes from the rain.

If the sensitive bow out, that’s their loss, for Peau d’âne is children’s fantasy on a human scale, set in a mythic age of princesses and fairy godmothers but filmed in a recognizable, real world. It makes for a stark contrast to the kids’ movies of today, where the horses never get near a bucket of paint because they’re pastured inside computers. Brought to life in the castles and the countryside of the Loire, Demy’s vanished age is a lot more present than the bit-mapped nowheresville of a movie like The Polar Express.

Demy’s style is colorful and flat. The props are a little cheap and purposefully anachronistic; Delphine Seyrig, Deneuve’s fairy godmother, has a dial telephone sitting on a tree stump in her bower. When Seyrig flounces through a glade guarded by the ruins of classical statues, Demy shows how his fairy-tale past, which is based on a Charles Perrault tale from the 17th century, is built on antiquity. Now that the kind of cinema created by the director of Lola, Les parapluies de Cherbourg, and Les demoiselles de Rochefort teeters on the edge of a computerized chasm, Demy’s ruins seem more poignant than they perhaps did when the film came out to general disparagement 35 years ago.

Peau d’âne is ruled by a kind of ugly-beauty future past that predicted the jarring color schemes of the 1970s and today seems exactly contemporary. A transparent bubble coffin transports the body of the dead queen (also Deneuve) through the snow, and her death and that science-fiction coffin set the film’s plot in motion.

On her deathbed, the queen made the king (Jean Marais, from Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête) promise her he would remarry only if he could find a woman more beautiful than she. After he rejects the available noblewomen ("They are all one-eyed or hunchbacks"), he decides that only his own daughter, the princess, is more beautiful than the late queen. What can he do but propose marriage? Suspecting that this arrangement isn’t for the best, the princess flees to her fairy godmother and asks for help. "Children do not marry their parents," the fairy godmother explains helpfully, then comes up with a scheme to get the king to reject his daughter. The princess will ask her father to kill and skin his "banker," a donkey. This donkey doesn’t talk with the voice of Eddie Murphy or anyone else; instead, it defecates gold coins and gemstones.

The plan backfires and the princess is forced to flee the kingdom in disguise. Living in a witch’s house as a scullery maid, she catches the eye of a prince, but, per the fairy godmother’s plan, she still has to learn that "life is not so easy as you think." The Freudian aspects of the plot are obvious — a daddy’s girl, money that is shit — and Demy makes them into the kind of incest-taboo myth Lévi-Strauss used to map. Soon enough — for the film moves quickly, aided by Michel Legrand’s psycho-pop hurdy-gurdy songs and score — all is resolved with the arrival of that exemplary ’60s machine, the helicopter, as in Visconti’s 1967 short "La strega bruciata viva."

Demy mixes real animals with statues of animals, giant stuffed animals, and people dressed as animals. A nasty old lady spits live toads via the uncomputerized magic of editing. Flowers are anthropomorphosed too: a talking rose hides human lips or an eye inside its petals. Peau d’âne and Demy’s previous film, the melancholy LA-based Model Shop, were deemed proof of his decline after his ’60s masterpieces. Now it’s clear that he (and Legrand) were ahead of their critics. Rather than continue in a vein Demy had bid goodbye with Model Shop, Peau d’âne invented something strange, beguiling, new.