GREGOR CAMERON reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: enchantment.

WHAT A TREAT these Demy films have been! Peau d’Ane is Jacques Demy’s ode to the fairy tale and its place in the art of storytelling. Not for him is the sugar coated Disney pleasure factory and while his heroine is pretty (Catherine Deneuve), she is far from an innocent bystander in this adaptation of Charles Perrault’s original Donkey Skin – a variation of the Cinderella type of fairy tale. Demy never allows us to forget that, in this world of fabulous costumes and castles, we are in fact only following a story being used to illustrate some wider point. With its engagement with possible incest between father and daughter and that daughter’s choice to take charge of her fate there is a clear indication that Demy may be suggesting, through Perrault’s story, that becoming a victim can sometimes be a choice and perhaps those exposed to this story should take the point that we are all somehow culpable for our own fates. Clearly there are similarities in the way Demy intends this story to comment on the present age that Perrault’s Bluebeard story has been used in film – most notably in local times during the shadow puppets segment in Campion’s The Piano (1993).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: on the town.

IT’S HARD to imagine a film that achieves such orgasmic pleasure as The Young Girls of Rochefort. People don’t walk, they dance. The characters can’t contain their excitement with life that they break into song. They don’t need to talk. Musical instruments are blown or strummed like toys. The centre of Rochefort appears as if Cupid had thrown a cluster bomb into it. And you can feel Demy’s pleasure in making this film (and Varda’s in re-touching it). This is one of the most enjoyable filmic experiences around, infused with the love of film and life. It’d be easy to pass this off as frivolous, lightweight, but it’s a rarity in cinema, a film that’s so wondrously overburdened with pleasure that you marvel at how it was sustained for so long.

TIM WONG reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: scenes from a marriage.

IF MICHAEL HANEKE ever makes a film about love (save for the psychosexual transgressions of The Piano Teacher), chances are he’ll reach for Veleska Grisebach’s Longing (Sehnsucht) as a point of reference. An intensely framed disintegration of marriage and intimacy, at its simplest a parable of infidelity and fate, it sparsely, yet acutely contemplates the ramifications of an affair between a metalworker and waitress (Andreas Müller, Anett Dornbusch), whose initial one night stand is enclosed within a magnificent jump cut preceded by the pop-lustiness of Robbie Williams’ ‘Feel’. Meeting at a volunteer firefighter’s convention, the pair liase several times more; meanwhile back home, the metalworker’s baby fawn wife (Ilka Welz) longs unbearably for her husband’s touch.

Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

RENOWNED Indian auteur-director Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s latest film, Naalu Pennungal (Four Women), has been short listed among 20 movies to compete for the prestigious L’Age d’Or (Golden Age) Award at the Belgian Film Archives. The movies would be archived.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: German disquiet.

IT’S HARD not to escape the taste of allegory in the film. Maybe it’s academic training that forces me to believe that every post-unification German tale carries the weight of history behind it, but there have been a number of German films recently that have tried to confront the past, isolation, and abandonment. And Ghosts (Gespenter) has it all – a strongly delineated East/West divide, the couple are from France/speak French while the two teenagers are strongly German. There’s a class divide, one side is clearly poor, one side is clear rich, cultured, elitist. There’s the sense of abandonment that’s sieved through the film, the characters are forced to deal with the isolation, the pain that the abandonment causes (both in the past and in the present). But putting aside my allegory readings, the film is a disquieting, understated melodrama. Its characters are people searching for answers, questions, not quite sure of what happened in the past. And audience don’t really know either, the ambiguous ending leaves open multiple interpretations – no-one I’ve talked to after the film had the same view on the events.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: discovering Demy.

I WONDER if the Film Society found it difficult to know exactly when to schedule Jacquot de Nantes, a tribute to Jacques Demy. Should it have beeen after all the Demy films so the viewers can pick up on the references and little in-jokes, and have a clearer understanding of Demy’s worldview? Or should it be before the movies, giving an insight into the man, and therefore changing the way a viewer subsequently sees his work. After all, after watching Jacquot de Nantes, it’s easy to see where Demy’s fascination with the everyday, where his love of music or his hard-edged view on romance come from. However, this genre-bending piece does benefit from a little foreknowledge, and viewers with little background in Demy’s films or French New Wave cinema in general, may find it banal or trite. Those who do know a bit of Demy may find it intimate, rich, touching, inspiring and sad.