Year: 1964
Director: Jacques Demy
Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon
The main theme of The Umbrellas of Cherboug composed by Michel Legrand falls like rain. A recurring motif that cascades throughout the picture, encouraging the viewer to be swept up in it’s wake; swept up in the flood of first love as experienced by its wide-eyed ingenue, Geneviève Emery (Catherine Deneuve).
We meet her aged 17, a shop girl whose life is very much entwined with that of her mother (Anne Vernon). We’re advised – off-hand and in song as all dialogue is sung – that she has no friends. Her world is small. Modest. But she has love in her life. Said love is 20-year-old mechanic Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), a man of modest ambition who can think of nothing he desires more than to marry Geneviève and open a gas station painted white. It’s a picturesque ideal. Cute and obtainable and through this it speaks of the scale of their lives. Their station in 1950s France.
In Jacques Demy’s wondrous film – which manages to feel both small and expansive through its quasi-pop-opera construction – the young couple are rendered as exquisitely naive. They declare their love for one another over and over, (literally) singing their hearts out, and we’re encouraged to remember the exaggerated emotions of first love. The life-or-death of it. How it overwhelms, rising up and over just as Legrand’s musical accompaniment dares to at the end of the movie’s first act.
For life and experience are about to collide with Geneviève and Guy’s best laid plans.
Guy is drafted into the army and must leave Cherbourg. The couple are crestfallen. They cling to one another on his final night in town, singing to and over one another as Demy and Legrand’s song-writing mimics the intensity of emotion found in both opera and the modern musical. Everything is externalised and all feeling is embellished. It’s a rousing scene taking place in one of the film’s few dowdy locations; a modest café. A table and two chairs that will echo later in the film when their emptiness is studied by a forlorn Guy on his eventual return to town. We’re moved to ruminate on how the momentous moments in our lives often take place in the most commonplace locales, imprinting the everyday with new meaning.
This is something of an irony in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg where – almost everywhere else – the set designs are infamous for their stunning pastel largess. Ahead of the release of her recent Mattel mega-hit Barbie, Greta Gerwig shared a ‘mood board’ of her cinematic reference points featuring three Jacques Demy joints, including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (side note; I love the phonaesthetics of its original French title Les Parapluies de Cherbourg). While the film has been immeasurably influential across cinema in the intervening years – and especially within the remit of the musicals that followed – its aesthetic value to Gerwig is clear. The interiors of the Emery home feature vivid wallpapers contrasting dreamy sky blues with deep and pungent puce. These baby blues and pinks are then complimented in the gorgeous costuming by Agnès Soulet. The shop’s umbrellas slash the surroundings with further rods of colour and the whole enhances the sense of childhood innocence that exists at the beginning of the film, ready to be torn asunder.
Of course, Ruth Handler’s landmark doll already existed in the world of the film’s 1963 creation, and one imagines the pristine aesthetic of Barbie were in the mix when Demy envisaged his film and its look, as well as the blissful naivety exhibited by Geneviève.
While Guy is away, Geneviève has her own complications to overcome, which inevitably reshape the remainder of the film, slowly slipping with inevitability into romantic tragedy. A perfect storm of her mother’s financial difficulties, her own unexpected pregnancy and the appearance of well-travelled antiques dealer Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) lead Geneviève to marriage, casting aside her dreams of a life with Guy for a more pragmatic solution to impending problems.
The handling of the family’s minor economic crisis always raises a smile, as Madame Emery bemoans that they own nothing, and only her most precious necklace could possibly be sold to pay their debts, yet our tour of their home frequently reveals cabinets of antiques and elaborately detailed mirrors. This feels intentional. A wry social critique perhaps. But also indicative of a certain playfulness that exists here from the film’s very beginning. See, for instance, Guy’s locker room conversations with his pals at the garage, where musicals are bemoaned… in song. In order to fit the cadences of the often jazzy underscore, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is riddled with amusing nonsequitor announcements from any and all comers.
Thanks to its heightened presentation – from the singing on down to the production design – Demy’s bonbon feels like it exists outside of the real world; his Cherbroug is like a candy-coloured model set inside a snow globe (visits to drably functional railway stations feel almost rudely intrusive of this sensation). And then, at the film’s finale, it is as if we are inside a snow globe. It’s my favourite section of it all, even though it is the most rueful, the most bittersweet (perhaps that is the reason why).
Jumping forward several years, Guy has wed his aunt’s former live-in nurse Madeline (Ellen Farner), and together they have the life he once envisaged with Geneviève, operating a white Esso station on the fringes of town. It’s Christmas time and a gaudy tree adorns Guy’s office. Out of sheer happenstance, Geneviève stops to fill up her car and the two are briefly, unexpectedly reunited. It’s a simple, slightly standoffish exchange, but one without malice or melodrama. The great exaltation that typified their time together at the start of the picture is over. There’s a solemn maturity about their reunion. A sadness that is not prolonged. Indeed, its such a fleeting moment. Such a light dose of nostalgia between the actors that is ultimately given rousing importance only in its aftermath, as Demy cranes away from the gas station framed in a flurry of snowfall and Legrand’s theme crescendos for the final time.
The sadness at the heart of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg isn’t solely for Geneviève and Guy. They have, by the end, found new lives, new happiness. But the path to it is what’s being mourned. The loss of innocence and perfection through the corrosive cost of simple, everyday life experience. The things that happen that can’t be escaped, even in Demy’s ice cream sundae of colour and song. It is this loss that we feel and share, identifying with our own long-lost naivety. Demy presents it with such sweetness that the bitterness of the pill is easily – readily – swallowed.
The Lost Highway Hotel 