Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo

Director: Jacques Demy

Screenplay/Music: Jacques Demy, Michel Legrand

Running time: 1 hr 40 mins

Genre: Musical/Drama



CRITIQUE:


West Side Story, Singing in the Rain, The Sound of Music, these are Hollywood musicals that captured the imagination of the popular culture – but the answer was different from a certain Nouvelle Vague director Jacques Demy, as expected from a French director, he sticks two fingers back to the American studios and make something, well, typically French. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was his riposte and at the same time, his homage. He drops the dialogue and instead, integrates it to the musical sequences where everything is sung. It might appear off-putting to mainstream audience, but in the hands of Demy, the inspired baton of Michel Legrand, and the voices of the two gorgeous leads, the result is disarmingly effective.


Unabashedly romantic, it is idiosyncratically French as the two young lovers, Guy and Geneviè (the captivating leads Nino Castelnuovo and Catherine Deneuve), clinch for a young, rapturous love – both goes to theatre, walk arms around each other in streets and sigh “je t’aime” like pet names. This is a tale of first love, broken by the sheer realities of life. Whilst a musical, it happens to heighten reality and one would expect overstatement of the tale, yet it remains simplistically grounded, believable and even heartbreaking, filled with slices of life perhaps clichéd now but not in 1963. Its dialogues in the songs don’t even sound lyrically embellished as most of it come from everyday language and discourse. The hyperbole lies in the exuberant visuals, the use of highly striking colours as though Demy planned to encompass every shade in the rainbow. Nevertheless, it evokes emotional vivacity that is set in contrast with the melancholic presence of the ever-raining town of Cherbourg, exemplified in the genius opening sequence of the rain and umbrellas and that haunting, extraordinary score. Of all its cotton-candy, Smarties-factory-themed wrappings, this is an exquisite piece of cinema as beautiful, as tragic, as rare as first love.


VERDICT:

Rapturous celebration of romanticism, the cinema and anything French, crooned to perfection by Deneuve and Castelnuovo. This may be one of the greatest, rarest musicals ever made. Melodramatic yet bittersweet. You’ll never see anything like it.



RATING: A+