Three Seats for the 26th - 1988
- Director Jacques Demy
- Product Code: NA-P2061-8052-DRA-LT
- Reward Points: 1
- Availability: In Stock
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Tags: Three Seats for the 26th, Trois places pour le 26, Three Seats for the 26th 1988, Jacques Demy, Yves Montand, Mathilda May, Françoise Fabian, Patrick Fierry, Michel Legrand, Claude Berri, Jean Penzer, Sabine Mamou, Bernard Evein, Rosalie Varda, France, French cinema, French film, 1988, 1980s cinema, musical, drama, romance, biography, musical comedy, French musical, backstage musical, music hall, Marseille, Marseille Opera, theatre, stage production, rehearsals, dance, song, performer, singer, actor, artistic career, celebrity, memory, nostalgia, homecoming, lost love, first love, Marion, Mylène, mother daughter relationship, father daughter relationship, identity, fiction and reality, metafiction, metacinema, film about performance, film about music, Michel Legrand score, Jacques Demy musical, French auteur cinema, European cinema, art cinema, final Jacques Demy feature, collectors cinema, French film heritage
Yves Montand returns to Marseille, the city of his youth and the place where his early artistic ambitions were formed, to rehearse a new stage production before an international tour. At the Marseille Opera, episodes from his career are reconstructed as musical theatre, allowing public biography, private recollection and performance to occupy the same dramatic space. Playing a fictionalised version of himself, Montand becomes both the subject and performer of a show in which Jacques Demy examines what remains of a life once memories, professional mythology and personal history have been turned into spectacle.
Elsewhere in Marseille, Marion works in a perfume shop while dreaming of becoming a dancer. Her immediate ambition is to obtain three seats for the performance on the 26th, but her attempt to reach Montand gradually brings her closer to the production itself. Montand, meanwhile, remains preoccupied with Mylène, the woman he loved before leaving Marseille for Paris. As Marion's aspirations and Montand's search for the past converge, apparently separate lives become connected by old relationships, concealed family history and the peculiar logic of coincidence that repeatedly shapes Demy's fictional worlds.
Demy's final feature transforms Montand's recognisable biography into something deliberately more ambiguous than a conventional screen portrait. Michel Legrand's music, the backstage structure and the city of Marseille provide a framework in which performance continually reflects lived experience. The result is a late Demy work concerned with ageing, desire, artistic identity and the persistence of memory, while retaining the filmmaker's fascination with chance encounters, missed relationships and lives whose apparently independent trajectories unexpectedly intersect.
| Work Record | |
| Original Title | Trois places pour le 26 |
| Title | Three Seats for the 26th |
| Year | 1988 |
| Direction | Jacques Demy |
| Countries of origin | France |
| Gender | Biography, Drama, Musical |
| Colors | Color |
| Cast | Yves Montand, Mathilda May, Patrick Fierry, Françoise Fabian, Morad Anekkar, Jean-Claude Bouillaud, Antoine Bourseiller, Christophe Bourseiller, Geoffrey Carey, Sophie Castel, Raoul Curet, Mathieu Demy, Marie Dô, Danielle Durou, Bruno Glasberg, Thierry Gondet, Paul Guers, Bertrand Lacy, Catriona MacColl, Pierre Maguelon, Christiane Minazzoli, Carlo Nell, Georges Nery, Jacques Nolot, Victoria Obermayer, Géraldine Pailhas, Gille Rizzo, Jean-Louis Rolland, Jean-Pierre Spano, Hélène Surgère, Jean-Benoît Terral, Dominique Varda, Katy Varda, Joëlle Vautier |
| Producer | Claude Berri |
| Duration | 106 Min. |
| Original Language | French |
| Languages Present | English, French |
| Composer | Michel Legrand |
| Cinematography | Jean Penzer |
| Editing | Sabine Mamou |
| Based on | Original screenplay by Jacques Demy incorporating fictionalised elements from the life and artistic career of Yves Montand |
| Screenplay | Jacques Demy |
| Edition Record | |
| Subtitle | English, French, Portuguese, Russian |
| Editing Note | English appears only occasionally in Trois places pour le 26, mainly in passages connected with Yves Montand’s international career and in musical numbers evoking Hollywood. Some sections are sung in English and the language is used briefly within this artistic context, while French remains the film’s predominant language. |
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