Donkey Skin (1970)

Jacques Demy spent nearly a decade assembling this adaptation of Charles Perrault's 1695 fairy tale, and the result is one of the strangest confections in the French musical canon. Catherine Deneuve plays a princess whose father, having promised his dying queen that he would marry no woman less beautiful, settles on his own daughter as the logical candidate. She demands impossible wedding gifts, receives dresses the color of the weather, the moon and the sun, and finally the skin of a jewel-excreting donkey, then flees the kingdom dressed as a scullery maid. Michel Legrand's score is lovely, the châteaux are lovely, and a helicopter lands at the wedding. The tone throughout is playful and unbothered.

The princess does resist an incestuous marriage and does secure her own escape, which registers as a flicker of agency. It is a flicker that arrives courtesy of a seventeenth-century source text, not a modern thesis, and the film treats her flight as a narrative premise instead of a statement. Elsewhere the ledger is bare. The donkey's jewelled leavings are a whimsical engine of the plot, not a parable about wealth. There is no racial commentary, no environmental anxiety, no body politics, no neurodivergent framing, no historical argument to revise. The cast is uniformly white French, and nobody in the film appears to have noticed.

This is a picture that wants nothing from us but delight, and it earns that. There is no sermon here, no lesson tucked into the third act, no moment where a character turns to the camera and explains how we ought to live. Demy's surrealism is decorative and generous. For the purposes of cultural classification the thing is essentially inert, a beautiful antique with a mild proto-feminist pulse and nothing else to declare. The candle burns low. We record the reading and move on to the next reel.