Jacques Demy | La Luxure (Lust) / 1962

the definition of lust

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Demy (screenwriter and director) La Luxure (Lust) / 1962

 

As part of his longer omnibus film The Garden of Earthly Delights (with other films directed by Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and Roger Vadim) Demy’s short, Lust is an energetic comic explanation of one of the deadly sins, in French described as “la luxure” or lechery. According to the great French encyclopedic dictionary Larousse, lechery is defined as “The vice of those who abandon themselves to the pleasures of the flesh. Lechery is aroused by unbridled physical exuberance.” But to one of Demy’s two major characters, Bernard played Laurent Terzieff, as a young man studying his catechism he had only a vague notion of the meaning of the word.     

     As he tells his artist friend, Jacques played by a young Jean-Louis Trintignant, whom he meets in the street, a childhood friend of his had described it as meaning “luxury,” which to his childhood mind brought up images of naked women in fur coats and pearls siting near the fires of hell while munching on their equally heated meats. His goal of the day is to purchase a copy of  Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, just to look up the images surround “luxure.”

      In so doing, he relates the full story of how, having just learned the word from a priest demanding his students learn the Seven Deadly Sins, he stopped after school to discuss it with his friend Paul, the one who convinced him it meant “luxury.” At home, soon after, dinner is served, his own mother unbelievably wrapped in furs as were the women in hell of his imagination. Having forgotten the bread, his mother exits, while Bernard queries his father about the meaning of lechery.

      The father roundly slaps in the face for even having uttered the word, and when the boy’s mother returns she is so aghast that she sends her son off without a bite to eat. The child sneaks into his parent’s room, steals the dictionary and returns to his room to read about the “pleasures of the flesh,” calling up images in his mind of the local butcher and in utter enjoyment in cutting up with great exuberance the pounds of meat set out before him.

      On one hand the story clearly mocks the French Catholic educational system which forces young boys to learn of certain words for their catechism with even permitting them to know what they mean or even utter them in their own homes, the parents also not yet aware the true meanings.

     But before, during, even after Bernard’s storying telling episode, his friend Jacques has been commenting on the beautiful women around him, and at every opportunity attempts to seduce them with silly lines such as “Caroline, my cousin. Fancy running into you here. My heart, my soul, my sister. Let’s commit the incest I’ve dreamed of since my mother’s breast,” etc. While Bernard leafs through the pages of the Bosch book, Jacques begins to see all the women about him utterly naked while wrapped in fur coats. Even as they part he again returns to his adolescent womanizing, serving throughout as the perfect example of what lechery is truly all about.    

      Demy’s short, meanwhile, stuffs more nudity into its few minutes that perhaps any other film ever made. And the relationship between Jacques and Bernard, with their youthful lingo (“Let’s split like the banana”) and puns is fully representative of the New Wave.

 

Los Angeles, November 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).