Described by director Jacques Demy as 'a film in song' the visually intoxicating The Umbrellas of Cherbourg pays homage to the Hollywood musical whist imbuing it with a resolutely Gallic and decidedly bittersweet tone that explores how youthful fantasy soon give way to thwarted dreams. Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo) a 20-year-old French auto mechanic has fallen in love with 17-year-old Genevieve 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 the pair make love. Genevieve becomes pregnant and then must choose between waiting for Guy's return or accepting an attractive offer of marriage from a wealthy diamond merchant (Marc Michel reprising his role from Demy's masterful Lola).
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a remarkable film, both for its originality in being entirely sung throughout, and its psychological power. Unlike most opera, it really has a very astute handle on realities of every kind: romantic love, the effect of absence, war, the difficulty of readjusting to civilian life, the influence of older people, ambiguity of feeling on all fronts. Everything is very subtly portrayed, yet it has a concrete emphasis that arises out of the song itself, and the way it slows down the action to something archetypal, while filling it in with nuances and bright colours. Michel Legrand's music is key to its success, having a real impact on the emotions, and gliding from recitative to yearning melodies. The mother/daughter relationship is brilliantly handled, set against the brightest imaginable wallpapers and fabrics, the tone being both camp and straight. The influence of Max Ophuls's Madame de ... is clear in the jeweller's shop episode, as well as a continuation of the story set up in his own Lola, with a flashback to the amazing arcade in Nantes, here seen in colour ... The two suitors for the daughter, Genevieve, are wonderfully cast, adding to the heartbreak of the film, in that both are very worthy of love; in fact there are no villains here, only real life. Essentially, though, you can't help feeling that it is a tragedy of the kind that no doubt happens all too often, whatever the ambiguities of the outcome: that of being influenced by a well-meaning parent who made the same mistake herself, and who is projecting through her daughter her own unfulfilled desires, albeit unintentionally. At the heart of it all is Catherine Deneuve, combining prettiness and beauty in a way almost unmatched. She is so real in the emotional scenes, it is staggering, and her love with garage mechanic Guy is intensely romantic, and given the best tune. The film shifts in emphasis between its three parts, so that the mother and daughter feature in the second but hardly in the third ...
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