Restored 'Donkey Skin' is a magical, masterful musical

Anyone who still needs to be convinced of everything that's wrong with the artless, soulless floor show that is Joel Schumacher's "The Phantom of the Opera" should just spend a little time with "Donkey Skin."

Jacques Demy's fairy-tale third musical, released in 1970 as "Peau d'Ane" in its native French, has been restored and remixed to show off its luscious lollipop colors and snappy Michel Legrand tunes. Even if the restoration doesn't make "Donkey Skin" this New Wave icon's best effort, it's now that much more worthy of keeping company with "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "The Young Girls of Rochefort." And compared to the latest "Phantom," it's practically a primer on how to rework a literary classic into an impressively restrained movie with something fresh and intelligent to say.

Demy's screenplay adapts Charles Perrault's 17th-century fable about an idyllic place inhabited by a donkey that emits riches, golden goose-style, for all the castledom to enjoy. The trouble begins when the devoted king (Jean Marais) promises his dying wife (Catherine Deneuve, a Demy favorite) that he'll only take a new queen who's equal to her in beauty. A search of the land finds only one such creature, the king's own daughter (no wonder, since she's also played by Deneuve), and as you might imagine, that presents a few problems.

Taking the advice of a quirky fairy godmother (Delphine Seyrig) who looks more like a flapper, the princess hopes to put off her father's immoral advances via a series of impossible dressmaking challenges (find me a gown that is "the color of the weather," she says), and when that doesn't derail his marriage proposal, she demands the skin of his prized donkey. To her complete shock and horror the king complies, which sends her running away cloaked in the animal's filthy hide -- one of the film's many surreal enduring images -- until she can be rescued by a love-struck prince (Jacques Perrin), who reaches out to her in "Cinderella" fashion.

Those who've read Perrault will be able to determine the author's influences on-screen, but film fans know that the offbeat Demy is clearly responsible for the finer details of this strange storybook land where everything is slightly out of step and anachronisms get tossed around just for the heck of it.

So it is that the king sits on a furry throne in the shape of a giant white kitty, an old woman spits frogs between sentences, roses talk, helicopters drop in, and people as well as parrots burst into song. Go with it, if for no other reason than it's a lot of fun.

Mature fun, we should add, because in addition to the notion of incest, this particular fairy-tale world includes vanity, sexism, unemployment, and something called "love cake," which happily is not a euphemism but an actual baked good.

The happily-ever-after ending is suitably kooky, if parts of it feel a little too abrupt and tacked on. The problem with any ending is that most of us just hate to leave Demy's world -- where even the costumes have personalities -- for more of the "Phantom" filmmaking that we know awaits us in the 21st century.

Janice Page can be reached at jpage22@hotmail.com.