Three Seats for the 26th (1988) User Reviews (4)

Is it worth a seat?

[dbdumonteil · 9 May 2008]

The eighties were a very hard time for Jacques Demy;the New Wave boom long over,his movies of that time seemed to indicate that he was a spent force.

Is "Trois Places Pour le 26" a worthwhile film?If you are a Montand fan,like my good friend Writer's Reign who wrote the first review ,then this movie was made for you.If you aren't ,or if sometimes he gets on your nerves ,then you'd better move on.

This film,although it's a far cry from Demy's great works, shows the director's touch.A permanent feature of his work is the girl with a mother left alone: this kind of character is present in "Lola" ("if you knew about geography ,you'd know that in Chicago there are no sailors but gangsters") "les Parapluies de Cherbourg" or "les Demoiselles de Rochefort" .Most of the time ,the daughter is illegitimate.Like "lola" and "Les Demoiselles ","trois places " has several subplots ,but it's less complicated.The way the two main stories hang together is not very new,but effective.

Montand gets the lion's share :his life becomes a musical.It's pleasant to hear Piaf's "La Vie En Rose" or Monroe's "my heart belongs to daddy" ,but Michel Legrand's score is not particularly memorable,no tune really stands out and his best song by far in "trois places" is his old "Air des Adieux " from "Les parapluies de Cherbourg" .

Demy's career was erratic;his best works ("Lola" "Les Parapluies" "les Demoiselles " "Peau D'Ane" and his unfairly overlooked "pied piper") hold up very well today.But he also made poor movies ("l"Evenement le Plus Important ...." " Lady Oscar" "Model shop" ) ."Trois Places pour le 26" ,his last effort ,while it cannot be compared with the former works,is superior to the latter ones though.

Maybe too late, but still in the nick of time

[eschwartzkopf · 8/10 · 9 December 2008]

You don't need to be a Demy fan to like this film ... but it helps. The fast-paced, MGM-style, burst-out-in-song style that started with "Lola" appears in Demy's last film. Considering that Demy and his star, Yves Montand, would both be dead within three years, it's a good thing that "Trois places ..." made it to the screen.

It's a shame, however, that the film wasn't made 20 years earlier. For one thing, the contemporary up-tempo Eighties-style music of Michel Legrand -- while good in its own right -- doesn't mesh as well with Montand's own music of the Forties and Fifties as presented in the "Montand Remembers" show-within-the-show. (Montand plays himself, which is a nice touch.) And while we get to see Montand as a song-and-dance man -- something that international film-goers didn't experience very often -- it's at the graying end of a career.

The 20-year difference would've also helped the storyline, where Montand is looking for an old love from his early days in Marseilles. The story is that he hadn't been to his old haunts in 20 years, but the "Remembers" show and other references to his lost love date back to the early Forties. The streetwise girl of his youth (now married to a baron who's in prison after a financial scandal) is depicted in "Trois places ...," however as a woman in her late 40s at best with a 20-ish daughter. The film setting is contemporary (late 1980s), so there's a two-decade disconnect that, for the film to work, you just have to accept and move on.

Once you push that to the side, however, "Trois places ..." is archetypal Demy at his happiest, with near-misses, strokes-of-luck and the lavish pastel palette of his early color work. The only clunker is near the end, where the confusion of age and the vague mother-daughter connection with Montand sends a whiff of incest as Mathilda May begins a literal May-December relationship. (The storyline rushes to quash this for the viewer, although poor Yves is still in a quandary as the film ends.) "Trois places ..." is no starter film for anyone interested in Demy, but it's fun, entertaining and a good coda for his work. Worth seeing.

Note: "Trois places ..." is part of "integral Jacques Demy", the 12-disc DVD release this fall of all of Demy's work by Arte Video. It's only being sold in France as a Region 2 DVD release, although -- for €100 -- it can be shipped to the United States from amazon.fr, among other vendors. There are loads of commentaries and mini-documentaries that are only in French, but all of the films feature English subtitles. The prints are restored to the eye-popping color of original releases.

Meet Ivo Livi

[writers_reign · 11 February 2004]

Frank Sinatra and Yves Montand are, beyond any doubt the two supreme singer-actors of the 20th century. Their commonalities would take up too much space here but for openers both were Italian and spent their childhoods in the environs of International ports (New York and Marseilles respectively) and with six years between them were near contemporaries. Both started out as singers making the switch to acting once established as singers, both married high profile, beautiful and charismatic actresses. That's a good place to stop because whilst Montand remained married to Simone Signoret until she died Sinatra married four times in all. The differences are as fascinating as the similarities but that's not why we're here. There is one more intriguing similarity of sorts: Following approximately one decade in the limelight Sinatra suddenly found he couldn't get arrested and during that comparatively brief period he made a movie called 'Meet Danny Wilson' in which he played a brash, volatile singer who, as an unknown, signs away a lifetime percentage of future earnings, in other words the film was a thinly-disguised Meet Frank Sinatra. Montand's career graph rose steadily and he never had a fallow period but three years before he died he made this movie, at the age of 67, a movie that might just as easily been titled Meet Yves Montand. It's a breathtaking conceit. Montand plays ... well, Yves Montand, returning to Marseilles, where he had lived since he was two years old and where he had begun his career singing in places like the Alcazar. Now he's playing the Opera House in a show that reflects his own life, not only acting but singing and dancing as only he can. For the Montand buff it's pig-out time and it is bewildering why, after critical plaudits, it laid an egg at the box office. It's also bad for non-French buffs like me because French videos play only in Black and White on English video recorders so until/if it goes to DVD I am going to keep losing out. It's impossible to praise this film too highly. No one does charm like Montand, and he charms here; no one sings like Montand, and he sings here ... I could go on but you get the picture. The new score is serviceable at best but there are echos of other songs, notably Les Feuilles Mortes, which Montand owns, there are also snatches of La Vie En Rose pointing up the time when Montand was the lover of Edith Piaf, he himself, in a new number about Hollywood, gives us - in English - snatches of Singin In The Rain and Cheek To Cheek, complete with a nod to Astaire tap-wise. There is also a Marilyn look/sound-alike who throws in a few bars of I Wanna Be Loved By You, to remind us that she and Montand were once a very high-profile item. We even have the well-documented story of how Ivo Livi became Yves Montand, related by the man himself. This really is unmissable even if you only LIKE Montand. If you love, respect and admire him then it's obligatory. 10/10

A perfect ending to Demy's career

[philosopherjack · 30 April 2021]

Jacques Demy's last and mostly overlooked film is a perfect ending to his career, as beautiful and joyous and yet quietly transgressive as all his best work. Yves Montand (himself only two films from the end, as it turned out) plays (some version of) himself, returning to his childhood home town of Marseille for a stage show based on his own life (Demy visualizes the show with just the right amount of warmly cheesy intricacy), while also hoping to find his old love (Francoise Fabian); she's living in genteel poverty after her once-rich husband got sent to jail, with a headstrong daughter (Mathilda May) who adores Montand and gets a part in the show, falling for him and then sleeping with him, after which she rapidly learns that she just committed incest with her biological father. Needless to say, few musicals have taken the inwardly winding nature of genre plotting to such a point, although the speed and equanimity with which those involved shake it off and move on is equally notable. The film has great fun with the Montand persona, acknowledging the cornerstones of his biography, including his legendary love affairs (Piaf, Signoret, Monroe) and apparently ongoing virility, while suggesting suppressed shadows and secrets; it's as flexible with the musical form itself, at first giving us a world where characters break into song and dance in classic style; then in its latter stages confining the performance to the stage. And just as it channels Montand, there's the sense of a shadow portrait of Demy himself - another kind of return, heavy with allusions to and parallels with earlier works, and with something always beyond reach, summed up in the film's final, almost offhand moments, reminiscent of how The Young Girls of Rochefort placed the long-awaited meeting of its star-crossed lovers just beyond the final scene.