Donkey Skin

Director Jacques Demy's 1970 live-action French film puts a New Wave spin on Charles Perrault's 17th-century classic fairy tale. Bursting with wild colors, a simmering sexuality, and a Broadway-style score (by Michel Legrand), Donkey Skin is a sumptuous experience, emotionally, visually, and aurally. A radiant Catherine Deneuve plays a young princess who disguises herself in the skin of her father the king's (Jean Marais) beloved donkey in order to escape a rather inappropriate marriage. While living in a hut in the forest and working as a scullion, she entrances a lonely prince (Jacques Perrin) who sees through her deception (everyone else, of course, thinks he's crazy to have fallen for a girl who smells like a donkey). The fairy godmother here is very French, a wily manipulator of men, but most of the whimsical touches have a chimerical universality: talking flowers, singing parrots, a hag who spits frogs, etc. The mind-blowing surprise at the end, though, launches the film into a whole new stratosphere of fantasy. Presented in a beautiful-looking digitally remastered transfer, DVD extras here include an interview with producer Mag Bodard, and the segments “The Illustrated Peau d'Ane” and “Peau d'Ane and the Thinkers.” Highly recommended. (M. Johanson)