Jacques Demy | Lady Oscar / 1979

liberté, égalité, fraternité: a revolution of social and sexual equality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Patricia Louisianna Knop (screenplay, based on a story by Jacques Demy and Patricia Louisianna Knop taken from Riyoko Ikeda, The Rose of Versailles), Jacques Demy (director) Lady Oscar / 1979

 

Based on the 1972 manga work The Rose of Versailles by Riyoko Ikeda written primarily for teen Japanese girls, Jacques Demy takes the story into further territory. On the surface, it belongs in the category of Demy’s remakes of fairy tales and historical fantasias such as Donkey Skin (1970) and The Pied Piper (1972), although given its exploration of gender roles and feminist issues it also bears a strong relationship with his 1973 film A Slightly Pregnant Man. Moreover, one has to ask what film of Demy’s isn’t, at heart, a kind of fantasia about class and sexual liberation?

    Specifically, Oscar, born as the sixth daughter of General Jarjayes; the mother having died in childbirth, the General refuses to believe that she would have given up her life to yet another female child, and is determined to raise this girl and as a male heir he names Oscar François de Jarjayes (Catriona MacColl), bringing in a male playmate of the nanny’s grandson, André Grandier (Barry Stokes), the two growing up fencing, wrestling, and even sleeping together.

     This character might have easily served to represent Demy’s own bi-sexuality, but generally as Oscar rises to the ranks of the personal guard to Queen Marie Antoinette (Christine Böhm) and later as commander of the Royal Guards at the Palace of Versailles, although is often taken for a beautiful young male, most of the individuals within the court recognize her as a woman. Some of females of Marie Antoinette’s court even begin imitating Oscar in wearing manly clothing, a fact of which the handsome Swedish courtier, Hans Axel von Fersen (Jonas Bergström)—who engages in a long affair with Marie Antoinette and is attracted to Oscar—finds it so noteworthy that he tells Oscar no one back in Sweden would even believe it possible.

     And Oscar herself uses the lesbian card to help rid herself of the man her father has demanded she marry, Count de Gerodere (played, quite ironically, by the Fellini queer of The Satyricon Martin Potter), a man here evidently into S&M and willing to keep the now stable boy, André, as her man-servant because he is attractive, suggesting that he might dabble in cute boys as well. The scene where Oscar dances with one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting before bending her over in a goodbye kiss, is one of the most notable moments in this movie, a breech of decorum so deep that it creates a scandal that perhaps even de Gerodere might not survive.

      Basically, however, Oscar is recognized as a female and at another memorable moment dresses in a stunning gown as she attends a ball at which von Fersen is featured, in part to lure him away from Marie Antoinette. Her attendance at the ball, where no one recognizes her, even de Gerodere, is a bit like Eliza Dolittle attending the ball in My Fair Lady; although in this case von Fersen is most definitely attracted to her and dances a long dance with the woman he believes to be a cousin of Oscar, the evening ends instead with the commoner André finally admitting his love for her, although she cannot yet see him anything but a dearly loved brother.

     The unnamed critic from Variety argued: “Catriona Maccoll is worth further attention for her lovely limning of Oscar, a woman waiting to burst out of a man’s clothing,” a statement that I find almost as misogynistic and perhaps even homophobic as the society in which Oscar exists. Oscar is not at all uncomfortable with her “male” attire—after all, she as worn such costumes for her entire life—as she is desirous of engaging her body in actions that include more than standing on guard near the Queen or riding a horse with the rest of her guardsman. She is desperate to engage her body in sex, whether it be male or female. In this case, being cis-gender, Oscar simply wants a man who might do more that curl up between her and her doll, as André has.

     But instead of focusing on the sexuality that such a gender crossover might hint at, Demy instead looks at it primarily from a far more revolutionary view of how it affects one’s very notion of human relationships and represents it from a far more feminist viewpoint wherein Oscar, born a royalist and a believer in the patriarchal order, is gradually forced to perceive the equality of mankind and the free herself from sexual bondage.

     The French Revolution, in which André is deeply involved, becomes the backdrop against which Oscar, protecting the very forces which created the injustices which ultimately cause the rebellion, begins to perceive through André and her own intelligence that life outside of the court

is anything but gentile, joyous, and protected, a world in which human beings go starving, are run down in the streets, and tortured at will—all so that the Queen might create a backyard version of a volcano, buy a new diamond bauble, or create a theater in which she can pretend to act in plays already banned by the King.

    Yet even this spoiled Austrian-born princess can be seen battling the patriarchal order, refusing to give in to even her husband’s demands, and taking to court a woman and a cardinal who have wrongly implicated her in the purchase of jewels she has even refused for herself. For Marie Antoinette her actions derive mostly a selfish desire to be entertained and, most of all, to find love while she is still young; but nonetheless she stands up to the male order time and again without comprehending how her general behavior effects the rest of society outside of the court, and with whom if she had any ability for deep thought, she might have found a spiritual ally if not a financial one.

     For Demy clearly, the French revolution was not just a social and cultural shift, but also a sexual one on all fronts, particularly regarding the role of women in society, the very kinds of battles that Oscar and even the Queen were waging from within.

    When the commander of the Royal Guards is ordered to shoot at the rebellious citizens of the street, Oscar finally refuses to call the command, committing treasons and suddenly becoming one of the masses rather than the elite while claiming her place by her true lover, André’s, side. Her literal sword battle with her father in which he is prepared to murder his own daughter for her actions, and her escape from the Bastille, along with the final march of the citizenry represent moments, in my thinking, that are far more rousing and certainly more complex than similar scenes popular musical Les Misérables. As Letterboxd commentator Carlos Valladares expresses such sentiments:

 

“It is infuriating and outrageous that Lady Oscar isn't as discussed or known as it should be. While Americans get watered-down versions of revolutionary art (viz., the Americanization of the Franco-musical-ization of the Victor Hugo novel Les Misérables, which I've heard baffling defenses of over Demy's art), in the 1980s, Demy was actually out in the barricades, making pop-socialist-art through musical formats to eye-opening effect.”

 

      At the very moment that Oscar joins the people, however, André is shot and killed by the very guards that she once commanded. The Bastille is liberated, but Oscar’s lover has been lost to the old cause, or as he would put it, he has given his life for the new freedoms of not only social equality but the freedoms of gender and sex as well.

      Most of the critics of the day didn’t quite get Demy’s message, and the movie failed terribly, taking a very long time to even reach US and British audiences. Even today it is not readily available for streaming on the US internet, I saw it on a pirated Russian station which I can only praise for keeping these basically “lost” films alive. Scholar Anne E. Duggan, in her 2013 book Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy devoted a wonderfully intelligent chapter to this film; but otherwise, the commentary is as scarce as the movie itself.

    Once more, as David Thomson wrote of this director, “Demy remained most faithful [of the New Wave directors] to the delights of sight and sound and to the romance of movie iconography.”

And, one might add, always creating works involved with the complexity of gender and physical sexuality. Again and again in Demy’s work Lola finds her lost sailor, just as that sailor remains true to the comradeship of his fellow men.

 

Los Angeles, December 27, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).