A really beautiful book on cinema. The portrayal of a man and his work through critical interpretation and warmly attentive, detailed analysis…
Michel Boujut, Les Nouvelles littéraires
J.P. Berthomé has succeeded in finding the right distance and unassuming intimacy to talk about the Nantes director. He was often with him and, especially for his last films, accompanied him throughout the creative process. Without doubt it is this awareness of the many problems that a filmmaker can encounter in making a film that has encouraged him to spend time describing the conditions in which each of Jacques Demy’s films came into being.
Yannick Mouren, Contre Bande
Les Racines du rêve is not only the first monograph worthy of its name to be devoted to Demy but is also a complete work, serious in tone and just about indispensable, which immediately invites respect. This truly “complete works of Demy” is impressive for its wealth of information and the quality of its content. Jean-Pierre Berthomé first starts with a bio-filmographic account where he tells the story of Demy’s childhood and talks about the city of Nantes. In particular he relates anecdotes concerning the totally artisan beginnings of the filmmaker. For each film (the work is divided up chronologically), other than the accounts already collected, all the elements of directing (décor, costumes) are dealt separately with all the attention and the meticulousness they deserve.
Charles Tenon, Cahiers du cinéma
If books about the cinema are generally quite boring, it’s because they’re not like the films they are dealing with. Their style is more like philosophical jargon than the poetry of the image. Imagine how lucky we are here: with this book, J-P. Berthomé not only gives us the keys to a universe, he allows us in. Through the magic of his words, images reappear. Here is Michel’s big white car that he uses to pick up Lola. Overlooking La Baie des Anges, Jackie, dressed in white and Jean, dressed in black, just for love exchange their fetish colours… From film to film, Jean-Pierre Berthomé takes us into an immense labyrinth where the Passage Pommeraye in Nantes (Lola and Une chambre en ville) comes out on to the streets of Rochefort painted in joyous colours; where the damp streets of Cherbourg end up in Pacific Palisades Los Angeles (Model Shop); and where the port of Nantes, like La Baie des Anges, opens on to an infinite horizon. “I like port cities” says Demy “because anything and everything can come from the sea.”
Full of lengthy statements by Demy and interviews from his associates, enhanced by the continual moving from one film to another, this book really reveals “the origins of dreams”. The dreams of a director whose universe is so profoundly coherent that it continues to take shape even while he is compelled by material constraints to give up on the idea of turning his work into an immense puzzle: where Jackie from La Baie des anges would have met Lola, where Guy from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, now a truck driver and arriving in Rochefort, would have been thunderstruck by the resemblance of Delphine to his old flame Geneviève (both played by Catherine Deneuve)… Yes, although he was unable to transform his work into a quixotic saga à la Balzac, Demy manages all the same to invent his own geography and to create a world in his likeness. And Paul Guimard, in his preface, after having shown that Demy was unknowingly nurtured on Celtic myths and that Lola could be an episode from the Knights of the Round Table, adds: “Demy is infinitely less figurative than he at first sight appears, never ‘abstract’ of course, but more exactly transfigurative. We’ve sometimes got him wrong.” Here is a book with a structure like a fairy-tale, that draws us in “beyond the looking-glass” and makes the invisible visible.
Claude-Marie Trémois, Télérama
The point of view adopted by J.-P. Berthomé is one of a narrative which links the work and personality of Jacques Demy in a well-documented ensemble. He is successful in the features of the genre, i.e. showing us precisely how Demy developed and allowing us to re-experience the sequences, coincidences and recurrences that combined to make up this fragmented ensemble, which has passed from success to oblivion. He makes it easier to understand the complex influences that have produced this provincial yet cosmopolitan work. It is light but often cruel, of the people but rarely getting public recognition and is disregarded in the world of French cinema.
CNL n° 198
By adopting a chronological approach, Berthomé follows step by step the development and ramifications of a work whose absolute coherence is self-evident. For each film, before launching into a subtle and accurate analysis, indicating success but never hiding any shortcomings, the author minutely examines the birth of the project, how it was produced and then implemented. Thanks to this wealth of detail, we realise what huge efforts Demy must have gone to in order to align the world with his dreams.
Frédéric Bonnaud, Les Inrockuptibles
