Lino wrote:For anyone who's interested, I bought the spanish edition of Lady Oscar because I've been curious about it for a long time. First things first: the image is in its correct AR but is clearly not restored. That is not to say that it looks bad (it doesn't) but a restoration would make it look like a jewel-incrusted necklace. Yes, it's that pretty.
As for the movie itself, well, it's nothing to write home about but it's not the abomination that some people over at the imdb boards would make you believe it is. The central character is interesting enough to hold the movie on its slender shoulders but I missed the music the most. Yes, the score is lovely as ever but there are no songs. Maybe it's silly of me to expect that every Demy movie should have songs but I'm sure I'm not the only one to think this way, right?
Still, it's one movie worthy of reevaluation - and restoration. Which leads me to this pertinent question: why hasn't any major Demy retrospective/restoration of his other movies happened yet? The world needs more of his musicals on DVD, wouldn't you agree? Besides, I want to see his version of Pied Piper now!
Fascinating--I wasn't aware that
Lady Oscar was available on DVD at all--I've got an nth-generation VHS that some Chilean fan of
Berusaiyu no bara sent to me years ago. The DVD has to look better than what I've got. In case anyone is interested, VSOM has (or used to have) a copy of
Pied Piper available--it's not bad as far as those things go.
As to the original question about
Umbrellas vs.
Young Girls--the way I've tended to think about it is that
Umbrellas is possibly a better film in the sense that it's so tightly constructed, so economical, and kind of perfect in its way, but that
Young Girls is the film I love the most. It's as if Demy was able to distill pure essence of happy into that film. I quite literally cried tears of joy the first time I saw
Young Girls--and this despite the hipster doofuses sitting in front of me who howled with derisive laughter throughout the screening at the Music Box in Chicago. But I digress.
By the way, David Bordwell has expressed his love of
Young Girls of Rochefort a couple of times.
Here, he talks about the old days of the film scene in Madison, which includes this bit:
Members of the Union Film Committee, overseeing the only campus 35mm venue, were passionately debating whether to show Godard, or Jancso, or a John Ford retrospective. I convinced them to show The Young Girls of Rochefort, which hurt my reputation,and Play Time, which I think helped it.
And in
another post, he talks about what's on his iPod, filmwise; one thing is
Young Girls.