An irresistible portrait of the artist as a young boy, Jacquot is director Agnes Varda´s touching tribute to her late husband, visionary director Jacques Demy. Fro an early age, little Jacques, known as ”Jacquot”, is in love with the movies. Starting with puppet shows in his family´s garage, he begins his quest to become a filmmaker. At the age of seven, against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied France, Jacquot trades his toys for his first movie camera. Whether dressing the neighborhood boys as women for his first feature, or experimenting with animation on old Charlie Chaplin footage, Jacquot is a boy obsessed with the possibilities of movies. Inter-cut with these loving memories of childhood are scenes of Demy´s later films, showing the extraordinary way in which life influenced his works.
Interesting enough is also the combination of color and black-and-white shootage throughout the film, and the scenes where we meet the old Jacques (I suppose it´s the original and not an actor). In those scenes, which are sometimes interrupting other scenes of the much younger Jacquot, it´s shown very clear (in a way I think is on purpose) how time and aging make the natural beauty of the young human body disappear. Beauty unfortunately disappears very fast in life, and later on all we have left are memories of our youth.
There is also a short scene where the young Jacquot and a neighborhood boy take a girl up to the attic and undress completely in her presence. I suppose those are quiet normal things boys sometimes do when they´re growing up, but it certainly has to be a French movie to show it to the rest of the world.
A ten-year-old boy is sold by his parents in Lebanon to become part of a terrorist plot based on religious terrorism. He´s of course indoctrinated into the usual hatred that is common in terrorist groups but inside he´s only a small boy. Then an Arab French kid becomes involved unwittingly and a bond develops between the two, while they become even more alienated from and independent of the adults in their lives.
