There are many elements that persist throughout the incredible career of Jacques Demy, which make them easily recognizable – amongst them are often vivid colours, familiar actors and stories that pay tribute to a particular time in the history of his native France. A few of his best-known works are musicals, with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort being amongst the most beloved entries into the genre ever produced, and remain as cherished today as they were when they were first released. However, this discussion is not about these films, but rather another entirely, his stunning cinematic opera A Room in Town (French: Une chambre en ville), which tells the heartbreaking story of star-crossed lovers attempting to overcome a range of obstacles in 1950s Nantes, which was undergoing a lengthy strike from disgruntled workers that demanded better working conditions and further remuneration for their efforts, with much of these protests resulting in violence and tragedy, which Demy captures incredibly well. Produced with the kind of spirited dedication that made his work so revelatory (situating him at the very top when it comes to auteurs in and around the French New Wave), and placed him amongst the most beloved filmmakers of his generation, A Room in Town is a strong reminder of the reasons why Demy has been so widely embraced by a global audience, while somehow being seen as a more minor work for a filmmaker that, regardless of subject matter, managed to turn out incredible films when he set foot behind a camera.

Unlike the previous musicals that the director made, A Room in Town is much darker and far from the happy-go-lucky experience that made some of his previous works so cherished. However, despite the bleaker subject matter, this film is still a staggering achievement, for a number of reasons. The general story is set amongst the class divide, with the two central characters being drawn from opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum – one is a wealthy daughter of a baroness (and thus grew up fully enveloped in the world of the bourgeoisie), while the other is a working-class young man who is marginally connected to the upper-class by virtue of taking up residence in a small room in the apartment of the same wealthy dowager whose daughter he is romancing. This kind of narrative immediately lends itself to a considerable amount of complex storytelling, with Demy constructing a thrilling tale of two people from opposite ends of society defying all odds and falling in love. However, this does not imply that the film is in any way lighthearted, despite the potential for it to be a much warmer film than it is. We have to wonder whether Demy was actively trying to make something much darker, since tragedy lurks in every frame of this film – the characters sing about their lives, drawing attention to the more harsh aspects of their existence (whether economic or psychological), and the film never deviates when it comes to challenging our conception of what these characters have to endure, with the violence being potent, leading to a strong emotional reaction that may shock viewers going into this film expecting something more along the lines of the director’s more upbeat musicals.

There is a nuance to the tragedy at the heart of A Room in Town that prevents it from being entirely derailed by misery. This is not the all-encompassing, definitive history of workers’ liberation in Nantes in the 1950s, but rather an intimate, character-based drama that aims to look at a few individuals and their experiences during a period of tumultuous social unease. This is a very internal film, to the point where it feels intensely personal, despite being a fictional narrative propelled less by real events and more by the director’s sense of endless imagination. Considering A Room in Town is set in Nantes, where the director was born and raised, and centres on an era when he would’ve been a young man himself, one has to wonder whether the story was motivated by the director’s own observations as a young, working-class individual who saw his life shaken up by a series of protests that essentially changed the course of his future, as made abundantly clear by the nuances present in this film. A Room in Town has a very distinct energy that Demy consistently managed to capture with very little difficulty – the small detail ultimately coalesce into a stunning and striking portrait of a small, idyllic French town undergoing an enormous shift in terms of social structure, taken from the perspective of someone that saw it first-hand. Mercifully, Demy is not too invested in the details – the roots of the strike are kept relatively opaque, and the general mechanics of it are not all that important. Instead, the focus is placed on the individuals that exist at the heart of it, which lead to a much stronger and more interesting film.

Demy consistently demonstrated a true gift for directing actors, so much that he often cast performers who weren’t trained singers, and still managed to place them in musicals without them seeming out of place. A Room in Town features a few recognizable actors, very few of them being known for their singing prowess, but yet still turning in extraordinary performances, which is only more impressive when we realize every line of dialogue is sung in this film, adding a layer of pressure on these actors to develop these characters alongside handling the beautiful score, which was composed by Michel Colombier, in a rare instance of Demy not collaborating with Michel Legrand. Dominique Sanda and Richard Berry are the leads of the film, playing the lovers at the centre of the story, and both of them are excellent. Demy develops them in such a way that they are consistently complex characters, rather than just ordinary archetypes. Neither of them are singers, but yet they convince us through their performances that they are fully in command of the characters. However, A Room in Town mostly belongs to Danielle Darrieux, who is simply sublime as Madame Langlois, a wealthy widow who maintains her status, while being sympathetic to the workers and their cause – as one of the few people whose singing voice in The Young Girls of Rochefort that was not dubbed, Darrieux and Demy had a very interesting relationship, so the choice to cast her in this part was not a bad decision at all, and she anchors the film, serving as the channel through which most of the dramatic material flows. She is exquisite and is undeniably the heart of the film, taking on a challenging role, but proving throughout it why she is one of the most important actresses of her generation, and someone capable of doing nearly anything, as reflected in this heartbreaking musical drama.

Despite rarely entering into discussions around Demy’s best work (since it is eclipsed by a few others), A Room in Town is still an incredible film, the kind of challenging musical drama that consistently takes a more active approach to the format, using music not as a narrative crutch, but rather a worthwhile component all on its own, which is one of the many skills the director constantly demonstrated when making one of his distinctive musical films. Perhaps its more appropriate to refer to this film as less of a musical, and more a tragedy set to music, since this is essentially what it is – the compositions are gorgeous but bleak, and they occupy the space normally reserved for dialogue, which is entirely non-existent here, which only serves to make this an even more multilayered experience. Demy has a fantastic eye for detail, and his ability to weave together a captivating story from the most simple of stimuli, and produce a film that is an artistic achievement all on its own, just further consolidates why he was such a tremendous filmmaker in the first place. Detailed, complex and beautifully made, A Room in Town is an astonishing piece of filmmaking that carries a heft that not many similarly-themed films, whether musical or otherwise, can attest to achieving, only further proving what an absolute master stood at the helm of this intimidatingly brilliant musical drama.