The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
Directed by Jacques Demy
This simple romantic tragedy begins in 1957. Guy Foucher, a 20-year-old French auto mechanic, has fallen in love with 17-year-old Geneviève Emery, an employee in her widowed mother's chic but financially embattled umbrella shop. On the evening before Guy is to leave for a two-year tour of combat in Algeria, he and Geneviève make love. She becomes pregnant and must choose between waiting for Guy's return or accepting an offer of marriage from a wealthy diamond merchant.
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5 films that influenced The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
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Fifty years old this spring (it won the Palme d'Or at the 1964 Cannes festival) and wearing well, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is inspired as much by René Clair's innovative French classic of 1930, Sous les toits de Paris , and the prewar Pagnol Marseilles trilogy ( Marius / Fanny / César ) as by Hollywood.
It came down harder in "Singin' in the Rain."
That’s right, there’s no periodic stopping and breaking into song, à la “Singin’ in the Rain,” every single “oui” and “non” and all the words in between are sung as if this were some kind of cockeyed opera.
It came down harder in "Singin' in the Rain."Likewise, the music, while melodic, tends to monotony.
Subtly borrowing from the sorrow-tinged blend of lighthearted romance and the darker drama of adult conditions seen in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the themes of future prospects versus childish ideals and the interfering nature of fate correspond with Elise’s claims that happiness makes her sad (or Madame Emery’s insistence that people only die of love in the movies).
The first of the story's three segments (though it runs some good deal longer than one-third) presents one of the most sympathetic, sentimentally gooey teenage romances ever, infinitely more compelling than in all of the teenybopper exploitation fare from then till now, trouncing the then-new musical West Side Story into oblivion.
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Jacques Demy is mostly known in America for his wildly popular musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (1964) and its less commercially successful but still beloved sequel-in-spirit “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (1967).
I've never been persuaded that Jacques Demy's second feature (1963) ranks alongside the masterpiece that preceded it (Lola) or those that followed (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort).
The French New Wave director Jacques Demy's ("The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg"/"The Young Girls Of Rochefort") second feature is not a masterpiece as was his debut film "Lola," but it's a brilliantly stylized and photographed romantic drama noted for its ever shifting moods between breezy and despair as it tells about the obsessive seduction of gambling in contrast with love.
She scored major triumphs recently with restorations of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and she continues with this week's release of Bay of Angels (1963), opening today at the Castro Theater for a week's run -- and with Lola (1961) to follow April 12 at the Lumiere.
Legrand's score is as essential to Bay of Angels as it is to Demy's all-sung The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).
Through Demy's eyes, sadness, by virtue of intensity, spins into its own strange expressionist rapturejust as addiction and desperation do in Demy's Bay of Angels.