Donkey Skin (1970)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Donkey skin |
| Original title | Peau d'âne |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1970 |
| length | 90 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Jacques Demy |
| script | Jacques Demy |
| production | Likes Bodard |
| music | Michel Legrand |
| camera | Ghislain Cloquet |
| cut | Anne-Marie Cotret |
| occupation | |
| |
Eselshaut (original title: Peau d'âne ) is a French fairy tale film directed by Jacques Demy in 1970 with Catherine Deneuve and Jean Marais in the leading roles. It is based on the fairy tale of the same name by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), which is also known in Germany as Allerleirauh .
action
A king and his wife rule over an enchanted land. When the queen is dying, she wrests her husband's promise never to marry a woman who is less beautiful than she is. But the only woman who comes close to the beauty of the queen is her and the king's own daughter. When his advisers urge him to marry in order to produce a male heir, the king decides to marry the princess. In order to dissuade the king from his marriage plans and to save the princess from a sad fate, a fairy named Lilas helps her. She advised the princess to ask for wedding gifts that the king could not possibly obtain. One of these gifts is also said to be the skin of a magical donkey that dumps valuable jewels into a compost heap.
However, the king actually succeeds in having clothes made in the colors of the weather, the sun and the moon. And he can even get the donkey skin. Desperate, the princess flees the kingdom. So that no one recognizes her, she disguises herself with donkey skin and takes a job as a swineherd in a neighboring country. The young prince of this realm finally goes in search of her. In a forest hut he tracks her down and falls in love with her. Back in his castle, he lies down on his sick bed and gives an order: "Donkey skin" should bake him a cake that will restore his health.
In this cake the prince finds a ring that donkey skin has deliberately baked into it. Now he is sure that his love for the supposed maid will be returned. When he announces that he will only marry the woman who fits the ring, all women and girls of marriageable age gather in his castle and try on the ring one by one according to their rank. After all, it is donkey skin who is the last to try on the ring that fits the piece of jewelery and thus reveals herself as a princess. At the subsequent wedding of the prince and princess, the fairy and the king also arrive, who in turn want to enter into a marriage bond.
background
Director Jacques Demy has been fascinated by Charles Perrault's fairy tale Peau d'âne (1694) since childhood and was working on a suitable screenplay for a film as early as 1962. The cast of Catherine Deneuve, who had become a star in the 1960s with his film The Regenschirme von Cherbourg (1964), made the production of the film possible in the first place. In doing so, she took on a double role by playing the first queen, marked by death, in addition to the princess. The shooting took place in France, among other places, at Chambord Castle and Le Plessis-Bourré Castle.
Many elements of the film are deliberately reminiscent of Jean Cocteau's famous fairy tale film Beauty and the Beast (1946). In addition to the cast of Jean Marais, who also played the male lead in Cocteau's film, this also includes the use of actors as statues in the castle as well as special effects such as slow motion and backward movements.
Donkey skin premiered in France on December 20, 1970. In Germany, the fairy tale film was first shown on television by Arte on December 25, 1997 .
Reviews
The lexicon of international films described Eselshaut as an "imaginative, poetic and sometimes ironic, distancing fairy tale film with many anachronistic breaks". With its "lightness", the film comes across as perfectly suitable for children, but with its "serious meaning" it is primarily aimed at "an adult audience". "Magical, but more for adults," said Cinema . Prisma wrote that the film was shot “[with] a lot of music, wit, tempo and magnificent costumes” and that it had two convincing main actors.
Awards
In 1972 Eselshaut was awarded the Círculo de Escritores Cinematográficos Prize for Best Children's Film.
Web links
- Eselshaut in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Donkey skin at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- Pictures of the film on cinema.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rodney Hill: Donkey Skin (Peau d'âne) . Film Quarterly, University of California Press, 2005, pp. 40-44.
- ↑ Donkey skin. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed February 19, 2020 .
- ↑ cf. cinema.de
- ↑ cf. prisma.de