The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Les parapluies de Cherbourg, France / West Germany, 91 minutes

Director/writer: Jacques Demy

Photography: Jean Rabier

Music: Michel Legrand

Editors: Anne-Marie Cotret, Monique Teisseire

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Anne Vernon, Nino Castelnuovo, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner, Mireille Perrey

Maybe I’m late to it, but I like to think I like musicals as much as the next guy, especially those classics from the 1940s and 1950s, often from the MGM studio. But I’m not sure I’ve seen many that are as willfully dedicated to the conceits of the genre as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, with the possible exception of the 2012 Les Miserables. There is no spoken dialogue here, only singing—every last doggone line. It’s possible there was some straight dialogue in Les Mis, I can’t recall for sure. I was too busy resisting any charms it might have had. But I know for sure there is no dialogue in Umbrellas. In both, necessary exposition can be dialed all the way down to some dialogue that is merely sing-songy chant, but generally no one is talking and everyone is always singing. That takes some getting used to.

The unusual and memorable color palette of Umbrellas is another feature that tends to stick in memory, along with the general weirdness. Let’s be clear. This is a really weird movie. The colors are bright and unnatural but also strangely muted, verging on sickening blasts of pastel, ideal for single frames and screenshots. What makes this movie work as well as it does—something about it I didn’t entirely catch the first time through several years ago—is how expertly it works its self-conscious tropes. Set in a romantic harbor town far from Paris, the story is divided into three parts. “The Departure” details the puppy-like intrigue of two adolescent lovers, Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) and Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), whose union is disapproved by Genevieve’s mother, Madame Emery (Anne Vernon). “The Absence” focuses on the changes for them after Guy is drafted and goes to the war in Algeria for two years, leaving behind a forlorn would-be bride. And “The Return” is the resolution, set a few years later. In other words, boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, and a happy ending. Well, maybe we’ll have to call this one bittersweet—it’s nonetheless fully on the romance spectrum.

And more properly I should say it’s girl-meets-boy, girl-loses-boy, etc., as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg focuses much more on Genevieve than Guy (pronounced in French, by the way, as hard-G “Gee,” which I found somehow captivating all in itself). It is perfectly classic in many ways. The sing-songy dialogue is never anything much to write home about, but composer Michel Legrand is capable of grand orchestral moments that can sweep you away even against your will, such as a scene near the end of the first part where the couple is separating at the train station. Guy is leaving for his duties in the Algerian war—a distinctly modern note that works well, introducing an interesting and sour political element with a light touch.

At these times, or in the monumental and highly charged wrap-up, Legrand’s music soars and carries us with it. It’s effective because narratively the music does nothing new, only plays to known expectations. It is only utterly faithful to what we already know to expect. We know how to respond to this story as it develops from seeing or reading countless other romances. Legrand as well as director Jacques Demy bewilder our expectations in some ways and in other ways devour us with them.

The whole thing feels a bit like a stunt, particularly given its origins in France in 1963 and 1964, a milieu producing feats of art cinema from folks like Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard at approximately their peaks of production. As a musical, Umbrellas is inevitably arch and self-conscious. By the time of its release date, we knew musicals and all their tricks. For me, it was the weirdness of this movie that ultimately drew me in to the love story. In the first 30 minutes I was sure the picture was never going to accomplish anything. Like noir and gangster pictures for Godard in Breathless, I assumed this was all some sort of intellectual exercise designed to make some critical point about cinema.

And maybe it is—but The Umbrellas of Cherbourg also manages to do everything most musicals aim for in the first place: entertain and touch the emotions sincerely. OK, maybe “manipulate” is the better term here. Umbrellas is constantly insisting on its authenticity as a musical. One scene, for example, shows Genevieve and Guy strolling down the sidewalk as they sing their lines. But they’re not actually walking. They’re standing on something wheeled or tracked like a wagon bed, which is being pulled forward in small lurches at approximately the rate of strolling. In another scene, the fruit bowl is topped with rotting bananas, reminding us perhaps that the bowl should have been full of perfect wax fruit.

Artifice like that or even the reminders of it are paradoxically a type of authenticity for musicals as much as for high French art cinema. Musicals by definition are full of fantasies and unreal moments. And artifice is definitely what makes The Umbrellas of Cherbourg so affecting as one from the heart. We know the beats of a story like this well, and any ironical distancing is somehow magically transmuted merely to more musical movie charms such as fake snow and children. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is whimsical. It’s French. It boldly puts on the phony mask of artifice. And wow does it work.