Peau d’âne (1970)

Donkey Skin (1970)

Directed by: Jacques Demy
Written by: Jacques Demy, Charles Perrault
Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Marais

Finally get to see the 2004 digital restored version of the 1970 French film on DVD. Directed by The Umbrella of Cherbourg‘s Jacques Demy, it also starred the impossibly beautiful and elegant Catherine Deneuve~ It is a lovely, magical, innocent yet slightly wacky adaptation to the Charles Perrault version of Fairytale story “Donkey Skin”. It’s one of my favorite stories, particularly memorable because of the disturbing incest premise (errr…a much needed moral lesson for little girls back in the days?). There were about 4-5 song numbers, mostly fluffy love songs. The humor, the painterly floral set and the outrageous costumes just made it so much fun to watch.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1974)

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a hauntingly beautiful, ethereal, atmospheric film directed by Peter Weir, it left me desperately intrigued and mystified.

The premise: Valentine’s day, 1900 – A group of students and teachers from an upper-class all-girl boarding school went picnic at the Hanging Rock, a landscape attraction in Australia. Four girls and one teacher went up and never returned. The search party’s efforts were fruitless, until days later they found one of the girls unconscious at the top of the rocks, who later recovered but seems to have lost her memory of the incident. The disappearance haunted those remained: fellow students, headmistress, police, strangers. They mourned, speculated and questioned…what happened to the other girls? what really happened up there?

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)
An absolutely lovely and eye-candy French musical by Jacques Demy. Music by Michel Legrand and starring the very young Catherine Deneuve. My god she’s so classically beautiful and full of graceful, innocent, youthful charm. Her perfect doll-like golden curls, pink overcoat, rosy cardigan, peach one piece dresses clothes, golden clutch, pastel purple poncho…it’s every vintage girl’s fantasy comes true. The entire movie is just the perfect romantic vintage-fashioned French dream. Everything is so stylized with very fashionable color palette: the wallpaper, the cute little teapot set, furnitures, little boutiques, miniature planes, umbrellas…etc. It could very well be called ‘Anthropologie: the movie.’ ^^;;