So this is another Jacques Demy movie. Like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it’s full of saturated colors and characters burst into song. This one, though, is a straight-up fairy tale, a Charles Perrault thing that you may be familiar with, and it’s retold fairly straightforwardly.

It’s interesting, and it does a good job capturing some of the horrors of the fairy tale; it also veers wildly around tonally, occasionally dropping in a modern wink or having a medieval king arriving in a helicopter for no apparent reason. I think my basic conclusion on it would be that it’s a charming little amusement, but not much more than that.

Also, I’ve mentioned before that the Criterion Channel (and Filmstruck before it) will do these “Double Features” where they’ll pair two movies that aren’t obviously related. This one was paired up with The Love Witch, which has a lot of stylistic and thematic similarities, but which I never would have thought of as being related if they hadn’t kind of pushed it that way.