Jacques Demy elevates the basic drama of everyday life into a soaring opera full of bittersweet passion and playful charm, featuring a timeless performance from Catherine Deneuve.
Jacques Demy elevates the basic drama of everyday life into a soaring opera full of bittersweet passion and playful charm, featuring a timeless performance from Catherine Deneuve.
Jacques Demy's 1964 masterpiece is a pop-art opera, or, to borrow the director's own description, a film in song. This simple romantic tragedy begins in 1957. Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo), a 20-year-old French auto mechanic, has fallen in love with 17-year-old Geneviève Emery (a luminous Catherine Deneuve), 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 (Marc Michel, reprising his role from Demy's masterful debut, Lola). A completely sung movie, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is closest in form to a cinematic opera. Composer Michel Legrand composed the score, modeling it around the patterns of everyday conversation. Umbrellas was re-released in 1997. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi
Seemingly banal and sentimental on the surface, [director Jacques] Demy has avoided these aspects by tasteful handling and the right balance in emotion, compassion and narrative.
Not only has he resurrected the quaint and artificial device of having the dialogue set to music and unrealistically sung, but he uses this operatic method to tell a story that is so banal... it wouldn't get beyond a reader in Hollywood.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg has stood the test of time as beautifully as Deneuve and seems likely to enchant future generations as fully as it has audiences over the past four decades.
A number of different factors raise this absurdly simple scenario to the level of highest excellence, but the chief among them is surely Michel Legrand's iconic score.
This bitter-sweet love story set to Michel Legrand's music from writer director Jacques Demy marks the film debut of the then 20 year old Catherine Deneuve, whose delicate beauty and screen presence has enchanted the world ever since
Enchanting from first frame to last, Jacques Demy's innovative, Oscar-nominated musical, which stars Catherine Deneuve, celebrates everyday life in song--all the dialogue is delivered through music.
A full-on musical. Singing from start to finish, all 90 minutes. All scored, no talking, total commitment. The production design is also awesome enough to give Wes Anderson a hard-on.How successful is it? Very. It's not without it's flaws, but it's very watchable.
The colors, the picaresque locales, the entirely sung dialogue, and the angel that is Catherine Deneuve! "The Umbrellas of Cherbourgh" is 90 minutes of cinematic joy. Simple human melodrama made engaging, profound, and unforgettable in the hands of a master (Demy). If the ending doesn't make you weep then I guess
you're just not human. A classic musical and easily one of the finest ever crafted.
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