The Cinematheque

“Sublime … A gloriously innovative tribute to both the Hollywood musical and to Marcel Pagnol’s melodramas … One of the film’s discreet strengths is that it always has one foot in reality, which tempers all that lushness with a rueful and invaluable authenticity.”

Kate Stables, Sight and Sound

Jacques Demy’s romantic musical is almost surely the first thing that comes to mind if you read the words ​“French musical in colour.” How could it not? So totalizing are the effects of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg​’s palette of pink and midnight blue, which set the stage for Demy’s reinvention of the musical. No longer in the director’s universe is it necessary to segment the use of music into numbers, or exposit plot through dialogue. Instead every vowel and consonant is part of a song—of affection, admonishment, fear, and desire. Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo play the couple, a hopeful shopgirl and a mechanic who smells of gasoline—“a perfume like any other.” They decide to marry. The rest becomes matters of fate and poetry, innocence and knowledge, deliberate artificiality and emotional realism. Michel Legrand’s unforgettable score and Jean Rabier’s mobile cinematography also star. This anniversary restoration premiered as part of Cannes Classics in May.

“[Demy’s] poetic exaltation of the ordinary, bursting with emotion, has its share of dark irony as well as respect … His fascination with ​‘normal’ life is emotionally and philosophically complex— both idealized and ironic, bitterly tragic and stringently comic.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“What’s so profound about the movie is that, in contrast to all this cinematic exuberance, it tells a story about how most of our lives cannot be controlled … Even when you’re deeply in love, you’re unable to control things; circumstances will just push you around and circumscribe what you can and can’t be, what you can and can’t do … I think the ending is the absolute definition of bittersweet.”

Ishiguro Kazuo, novelist (The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go)