In the sense that "The Sound of Music" is not considered a reliable source for lessons about Nazism or that "My Fair Lady" is a profound analysis of class struggle, musicals do not generally spring to mind when considering the great achievements of French cinema. However, the National Film Center exhibition offering a retrospective overview of film director Jacques Demy's career is so entrancing it's not hard to see why the reputation of this auteur has been reassessed in recent years.

Demy may have won the Palme d'Or at Cannes with "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)" in 1964, but opinion has always been split as to how seriously his stylized candy-colored vision should be taken. His peers — Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais and other members of the French New Wave and Left Bank group — were more obviously radical in how they attacked conventional storytelling and bourgeois directors professing to be anti-bourgeois. In this context Demy's attachment to the glamour of Hollywood musicals and the reverie of spectacle, seemingly for its own sake, has attracted charges of being frivolous and sentimental.

Time can be kind to kitsch. However, even taking this into account, it is revealing to consider Demy's romantic operas of everyday life and reworked fairy tales in an age when cinema is dominated by trying to make the fantasy of comic book characters fighting giant robots/monsters as earnest and realistic as possible. It's also likely that Demy's playfulness should receive a sympathetic reception in Japan, which gave rise to the culture of cuteness, especially given that one of his films, "Lady Oscar", is based on the hit 1970s manga "Berusaiyu no Bara" ("The Rose of Versailles") by Riyoko Ikeda.