‘En perme à Nantes’: Jacques Demy and new wave place

Abstract

As a cinema of place, the new wave is most famous for its loving representations of Paris, but many new wave film-makers, such as Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Demy depicted provincial France. During the 1950s, France experienced rapid modernization and urbanization, but by the end of the decade, France was beginning to revisit the provincial towns and countryside that had been transformed or left behind. In its narratives and form, the new wave registered this dual migration and fond glance back at the provinces as a tension between mobility and dwelling in place, between nostalgia and modernity. A detailed analysis of Jacques Demy's first feature-length film, Lola (1961) illustrates this double movement. Demy himself returned to his hometown of Nantes to film this story of return of departure, which he repeats in revised form in other port cities in his subsequent films, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966). In its dynamic of restless peregrination, Lola revises traditional regionalism by rejecting fixed origins and identities despite its undeniable attachment to place.