The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Rating **** Masterpiece Directed and written by Jacques Demy With Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner, Mireille Perrey, and Harald Wolff.
During my first visit to France I looked up a former teacher, who was working the night shift at a local newspaper in Rouen, and when I accompanied him to work one evening I was amazed to see him shake hands with every one of his coworkers when he arrived. I soon discovered that this kind of formality is also present in the everyday speech patterns of the French, who trot out formulas on all sorts of occasions: they’re just as common in intimate conversations between lovers and close relatives as they are between coworkers or between clerks and customers. Almost in its entirety, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a heartfelt, passionate, tragic musical suite made up of these formulas, which the film both celebrates and wryly examines to discover their inner logic: how they actually work, what they do and don’t do.
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Guy: “Thank you.”
It’s the most normal talk in the world. But because this is France, where even everyday talk is formalized, it has a strong rhythmic pattern in the original French–the way the customer and Guy say merci to each other, for instance, or the way the two uses of ce soir (“tonight”) and the Foucher and Pierre pair off like rhymes. Singing this somewhat musical everyday speech merely places its formal aspect in higher relief.
After spending a night with a prostitute, Guy discovers that his devoted Aunt Elise (Mireille Perrey) has died during his absence. He inherits enough money from her to buy an Esso station in town and winds up marrying Madeleine (Ellen Farner), the young woman who took care of his aunt.
This heightening of visual detail is the counterpart of the heightening of emotions and the sharpening of form achieved by setting the dialogue to music. (Though Legrand isn’t credited as the film’s cowriter, his collaboration with Demy, who wrote the lyrics, suggests that he may well deserve to be, for this is a film in which the score and the narrative are inseparable, shaped to the same architecture. Demy once noted that Umbrellas should be described as a film “in song” the way that some films are “in color.”) Jean-Pierre Berthome, who wrote the only book about Demy I’m aware of–the beautifully observed and richly detailed Jacques Demy: Les racines du reve (1982)–aptly notes that when Guy and Genevieve sit together in a cafe on their last evening together, even the drinks they’ve ordered (“Genevieve’s amber aperitif, Guy’s canary yellow pastis”) are color-coordinated with everything else in the scene. Demy’s visual orchestration is the perfect complement to Legrand’s musical orchestration; both create a powerful emotional intensification that perfects or contradicts the banality of the dialogue.
