By Jeremy Ambrose

Absence is a frightening concept, especially in regards to memory, belief and love. Of all the filmmakers, the one who seems to grasp the truth of absence better than most is Jacques Demy, as can be seen in these two extraordinary films, Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

In Lola, all the characters seem to be lacking something. There is an absence in their lives and none of them are truly happy. Instead, they are all infused with an overwhelming sense of desire, which often translates into sexual longing, seeming impossible to fulfil and in that impossibility perhaps revealing something more that remains unseen.

For the title character, the absence suffered is that of her first love, Michel, the father of her child, who walked away seven years earlier with nothing but a vague notion of return. Through her interactions with the other men in her life she reveals what she is longing for, that is, the end of that absence, and the presence of Michel. All her hopes rest upon this moment. In the meantime, she lives as best as she can. She has a casual sexual relationship with Frankie, an American sailor, who reminds her of Michel, and she happily pursues an attempt at authentic friendship with Roland Cassard, who is smitten with her. These relationships only succeed in highlighting even more, the absence she is seeking to fill.

For Frankie and Roland, absence is revealed by their searching, as they try to fill spaces of their existence. Frankie seems to drift from scene to scene in pursuit of pleasure and some sort of satisfaction before he returns to his fiancée back home. He doesn’t ask big questions nor seem to look for big answers. He simply roams the streets, almost like a carefree child, happy to taste and experience what he can, before it is time to walk on by. The absence he suffers is harder to pin down, and he is the one character who seems unfazed by it. Perhaps what he longs for is belonging, as he seems to belong nowhere stable in this film, being the perennial outsider with heavy accent and no direction. Perhaps he longs for home, and spends his time as enjoyably as he can with the knowledge that home, or “the real” is not too far around the corner. Roland, on the other hand, desires meaning in his life. He desires purpose and ambition, and believes the revived romantic love he had for his childhood friend Lola will give him the meaning he is desperately searching for.

The film is punctured by moments of beauty, but even this beauty is undercut by a sense that something is missing; an overwhelming feeling that happiness is just outside of one’s grasp. Cecile, a 14 yr old girl who befriends Frankie, doubles as Lola’s own past self, while Lola echoes Cecile’s future. Poetically the characters seem to be playing out the same story in a never-ending cycle, and in this way, we get a clearer sense that their desires for happiness are elusive, ungraspable, and ultimately tragic in their eventual trajectory. The poetic images of Frankie and Cecile at the fair evoke an innocence and beauty that is moving. However, the nostalgia of their goodbye again leaves an experience of inevitable loss, like water slipping through the cracks of a cupped hand. Even more illustrative of this loss is the mirroring of Cecile and Lola, such that we already can see the future of Cecile in her attempt to grasp at her desires. The innocent schoolgirl will one day be the cabaret dancer. The unmarried mother will continue to yearn for presence.

And yet, the film seems to promise that this presence is coming, and finally, at the climactic moment, Michel returns and we discover he has been haunting the film from its very beginning in the shape of the tall man in white, with cowboy hat and Cadillac. Here are all Lola’s dreams and desires come true. Michel appears as an embodied promise of all earthly desires, almost like a vision of something divine. Yet at the penultimate moment, undercutting the joy of this fulfilled desire having been reunited with husband and child, driving away in the Cadillac with the promise of prosperity, Lola wistfully looks back to see Roland walking away, alone and dissatisfied. Is this really fulfilment? Is this really a happy ending? Or is there the faint gloom of impending disappointment and unfulfilled promise hovering over and emphasising the bitterness in a bittersweet end?

Michel, the man in white, appears like a god but ultimately is not God, only a human person as flawed as any other. If Lola is hoping for all her dreams to be fulfilled by him, then disappointment is inevitable, and the film ends on the perfect note. Perhaps the ending and hopeless lack of fulfilment highlights a higher unnamed absence universally yearned for. Perhaps this image of Michel, though he is nothing more than human, is supposed to lift our minds to an absence that is ultimately the tragedy of the film, the absence of God.

Where is the divine presence? Or in appearing absent, is the divine ever more intimately intertwined with all? Is the endless criss-crossing between characters a work of grace and a sign of the real presence each seeks? The mystery of Michel’s absence is that in some way, he has always been present, by his face being imprinted upon that of his son, and perhaps in a similar way, the true presence of God is imprinted upon the authentic humanity of each character and even in what they lack; the hollowness that sits at the bottom of each heart, pointing to something not of this world, that desires to be fulfilled.

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In The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Guy and Genevieve love each other, with all the emotion and passion of young love. Their love is driven by desire for each other, a desire to be together no matter what happens. This desire is thwarted, however, when Guy is drafted to fight in the Algerian war. What follows is a period of absence which tests the endurance of this love and eventually paves the way for its demise.

Demy explores the uncertainty of absence and its destabilising effects in this extraordinary film, splitting it into three parts and entitling the middle part, “The Absence.” It is here Genevieve’s suffering is slowly transformed from the passion and mourning of one who cannot stand such separation, to the tragic realisation that her love is perhaps not as unmovable as she first imagined. Love, as an emotional state, shows its weakness as it relies on memory rather than choice, and so Genevieve sorrowfully acknowledges, “Absence is a funny thing. I feel like Guy left years ago. I look at this photo, and I forget what he really looks like. When I think of him, it’s this photo that I see.”

The desire-driven love of Genevieve, stripped away by Guy’s absence, reveals itself under the light of reality. She is seduced by pragmatism, rather than patiently choosing to wait. She is confronted by a concrete prospect, rather than the fading memories of a love she cannot see clearly anymore.

“I would have died for him,” she says… “So why aren’t I dead?” Her Mother’s response – “People only die of love in movies.” That, in a nutshell, is the mystery of choice that Demy presents in the film. Even though this is ‘a movie,’ where one ought to die of love, Demy offers a beautiful meditation on the reality of such things as desire, love and choice. The fantastical framework of a Musical is inverted by the real and ultimately crushing truth that life must go on, and love with it, but perhaps not as one expects. All dialogue is sung, giving melodramatic style and voice to the passions and emotions that arise from the action. Rather than this style being used to create a fantasy, Demy channels it into a maturity that appeals not only to natural sentiment, but taps authentically into the human condition, its brokenness, and its ability to survive. And thus we see three types of love emerge in the film, and are left to observe which the better is.

We first experience the fiery emotionally driven romantic love between Genevieve and Guy, which eventually is tempered by absence. Then, we see the pragmatic choice that Genevieve makes after assessment of her reality, accepting Roland Cassard (the same Roland from Lola, who again has fallen in love). Lastly, we see something completely different in Guy’s return to Cherbourg. We see his broken spirit and a decline into despair as he lives with the bitter wound of his betrayed love. Until he opens his eyes and sees Madeleine. The girl who never swept him off his feet, whose quiet heart didn’t beat loudly with the emotions of infatuation, but who loved with simplicity, displaying her depth and goodness by constancy and devotion to Guy’s Godmother and to Guy. It is a love that is sincere and mature, thus unlocking Guy’s desire to be the man he knows he should be and to pick himself up and start over again. It is a love that isn’t driven by neediness or reckless desire, but one that fosters reconciliation and a mutual self-giving, leading to authentic communion.

In the last scene of the film, this different kind of love shared by Guy and Madeleine reaches a moment of truth by a chance encounter with Genevieve. She is alive, but seems devoid of life, almost like all the characters encountered in Lola; there seems an absence of something within her. Is this absence the result of her inconsistent swinging between emotion and pragmatism, missing the ability to authentically love in each? Is she able to love or is she numbed by her own muddled decisions? It is not clear what is happening within her, but there is a sense that she is not satisfied. Whereas Guy, in the midst of all the emotional turmoil that would have flooded back to him in this moment, finds himself reconciled and triumphant in the living of the love he has chosen with Madeline. With all the possible bitterness from such an unexpected reunion, we instead experience a soaring movement of the heart that rises with the last chords of the musical theme allowing us to meet the sadness and nostalgia of the moment and yet rise to the beauty of a love well chosen and a life lived with presence –the presence of something transcendent. The final shot of Guy, Madeleine and their son, playing in the snow reveals this transcendence and marks a counterpoint to the appearance of coldness and lack of interaction between Genevieve and her daughter. We witness Guy pass the ultimate test, and are given a sense of the kind of love that exists between him and Madeline for this reconciliation to be possible. By absence, we come to understand “real” presence, and the fruitful, life-giving love that flows from it, something that is far more than pure emotion or pragmatism, something that is transcendent and thus, truly beautiful.