The movie opens with a blond man wearing white and driving a white Cadillac convertible around the city. This, it turns out, is Michel, returning to Nantes after an absence of seven years. Roland (Marc Michel) is a restless young man carrying a heavy burden of ennui along with his charm and his youthful melancholy. He gets fired and drifts into a bookstore, where he meets a woman and her daughter Cecile, and offers to lend the girl his French-English dictionary. The name Cecile reminds him of a woman he once knewand it turns out this woman is Lola (Anouk Aimee), a dancer in a local cabaret, dallying with a young blond American sailor, Franky, who reminds her of her lover Michel, father of Yvon, whom she refuses to believe will never return. Roland plans to go abroad, as a courier for some kind of shady deal, and finds he's in love with Lola, who does not love him. Still, she says wait two months while she goes off to dance in Marseilles, and we'll see. And just as she's said goodbye to all the girls in the cabaret, each of whom kisses the little boy goodbye, each calling him a different pet nameMichel arrives to deliver a surprising storybook ending. Little Cecile shares some rides with Franky at the fair, and the next morning runs away. Roland heads out to Johannesburg, even though the police have captured the smuggler who commissioned the trip.
The movie seems to offer Lola as the answer to Roland's blankness. In a crucial scene toward the end, they walk slowly through the upper level of an arcade of shops. He tells her, "Life's like that. We're alone and we stay alone. But what counts is to want something no matter what the cost is. There's a bit of happiness in simply wanting happiness. I wanted nothing until I saw you again. But now..." He pauses. "You're right. It's great to be alive." In the first scenes of the film he complains of not having lived, but in the end he knows.
Demy loved Nantes. It shows in the framing of city shots, and especially in the way the urban and industrial dinginess is balanced by crowded, human detail, and by people moving through the streets...
The movie seems to offer Lola as the answer to Roland's blankness. In a crucial scene toward the end, they walk slowly through the upper level of an arcade of shops. He tells her, "Life's like that. We're alone and we stay alone. But what counts is to want something no matter what the cost is. There's a bit of happiness in simply wanting happiness. I wanted nothing until I saw you again. But now..." He pauses. "You're right. It's great to be alive." In the first scenes of the film he complains of not having lived, but in the end he knows.
Demy loved Nantes. It shows in the framing of city shots, and especially in the way the urban and industrial dinginess is balanced by crowded, human detail, and by people moving through the streets...