The Other Sister
The Young Girls of Rochefort is a revelation—a staggering, eye-popping delight. Not only as a Jacques Demy/Michel Legrand candied confection with dance numbers but also as a showcase for the throaty, arresting French bombshell that was Françoise Dorléac.
In the current issue of Film Comment, Melissa Anderson traces the short-lived but incandescent career of Dorléac, the sexy, confident actress who died in 1967 in a car accident in Nice. Dorléac was only 26 at the time of her death, but she had already worked with directors François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, and Roman Polanski. And she had introduced her younger tentative sister—a very young Catherine Deneuve—to the screen. “Where Deneuve’s personality rests on innocence, Dorléac’s centers on carnal knowledge,” Anderson writes. “It is difficult to write about Dorléac without circling back to Deneuve, as though the less famous sister can never fully escape being twinned with her superstar sibling.”
Anderson weaves her own fandom—screening locales, research sessions—into this profile of Dorléac’s slender filmography and broad emotional range. The writer looks in particular at Truffaut’s The Soft Skin—Françoise as foxy, knowing, carefree flight attendant—and Demy’s homage to the American musical—Françoise as exuberant, trumpet-playing dancer who “even holds her own with Gene Kelly.”
“For a life as short as Dorléac’s,” Anderson writes, “film both restores and preserves her transcendent persona, one that can be coupled with—or cleaved from—that of her younger, adoring sister, Catherine. For adoring fans like me, adulation is rekindled with each viewing, now numbering in the high teens, of The Young Girls of Rochefort, which I first saw on August 24, 1998….”
Alas, the article is not online, but the issue is on the newsstands with lovely photos.
August 15, 2005 at 8:30 am
Liz, nice blog!
Rochefort is probably the movie I’ve seen the most number of times….It’s so easy on the eyes (and the ears)….