You don't need to be a Demy fan to like this film ... but it helps. The fast-paced, MGM-style, burst-out-in-song style that started with "Lola" appears in Demy's last film. Considering that Demy and his star, Yves Montand, would both be dead within three years, it's a good thing that "Trois places ..." made it to the screen.
It's a shame, however, that the film wasn't made 20 years earlier. For one thing, the contemporary up-tempo Eighties-style music of Michel Legrand -- while good in its own right -- doesn't mesh as well with Montand's own music of the Forties and Fifties as presented in the "Montand Remembers" show-within-the-show. (Montand plays himself, which is a nice touch.) And while we get to see Montand as a song-and-dance man -- something that international film-goers didn't experience very often -- it's at the graying end of a career.
The 20-year difference would've also helped the storyline, where Montand is looking for an old love from his early days in Marseilles. The story is that he hadn't been to his old haunts in 20 years, but the "Remembers" show and other references to his lost love date back to the early Forties. The streetwise girl of his youth (now married to a baron who's in prison after a financial scandal) is depicted in "Trois places ...," however as a woman in her late 40s at best with a 20-ish daughter. The film setting is contemporary (late 1980s), so there's a two-decade disconnect that, for the film to work, you just have to accept and move on.
Once you push that to the side, however, "Trois places ..." is archetypal Demy at his happiest, with near-misses, strokes-of-luck and the lavish pastel palette of his early color work. The only clunker is near the end, where the confusion of age and the vague mother-daughter connection with Montand sends a whiff of incest as Mathilda May begins a literal May-December relationship. (The storyline rushes to quash this for the viewer, although poor Yves is still in a quandary as the film ends.) "Trois places ..." is no starter film for anyone interested in Demy, but it's fun, entertaining and a good coda for his work. Worth seeing.
Note: "Trois places ..." is part of "integral Jacques Demy", the 12-disc DVD release this fall of all of Demy's work by Arte Video. It's only being sold in France as a Region 2 DVD release, although -- for 100 -- it can be shipped to the United States from amazon.fr, among other vendors. There are loads of commentaries and mini-documentaries that are only in French, but all of the films feature English subtitles. The prints are restored to the eye-popping color of original releases.
It's a shame, however, that the film wasn't made 20 years earlier. For one thing, the contemporary up-tempo Eighties-style music of Michel Legrand -- while good in its own right -- doesn't mesh as well with Montand's own music of the Forties and Fifties as presented in the "Montand Remembers" show-within-the-show. (Montand plays himself, which is a nice touch.) And while we get to see Montand as a song-and-dance man -- something that international film-goers didn't experience very often -- it's at the graying end of a career.
The 20-year difference would've also helped the storyline, where Montand is looking for an old love from his early days in Marseilles. The story is that he hadn't been to his old haunts in 20 years, but the "Remembers" show and other references to his lost love date back to the early Forties. The streetwise girl of his youth (now married to a baron who's in prison after a financial scandal) is depicted in "Trois places ...," however as a woman in her late 40s at best with a 20-ish daughter. The film setting is contemporary (late 1980s), so there's a two-decade disconnect that, for the film to work, you just have to accept and move on.
Once you push that to the side, however, "Trois places ..." is archetypal Demy at his happiest, with near-misses, strokes-of-luck and the lavish pastel palette of his early color work. The only clunker is near the end, where the confusion of age and the vague mother-daughter connection with Montand sends a whiff of incest as Mathilda May begins a literal May-December relationship. (The storyline rushes to quash this for the viewer, although poor Yves is still in a quandary as the film ends.) "Trois places ..." is no starter film for anyone interested in Demy, but it's fun, entertaining and a good coda for his work. Worth seeing.
Note: "Trois places ..." is part of "integral Jacques Demy", the 12-disc DVD release this fall of all of Demy's work by Arte Video. It's only being sold in France as a Region 2 DVD release, although -- for 100 -- it can be shipped to the United States from amazon.fr, among other vendors. There are loads of commentaries and mini-documentaries that are only in French, but all of the films feature English subtitles. The prints are restored to the eye-popping color of original releases.