Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac, George Chakiris, Michel Piccoli, Gene Kelly, Danielle Darrieux
Director: Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda
Screenplay: Jacques Demy
Studio: Madeleine Films
Running-time: 120 mins
Genre: Musical/Romance/DramaForeign
Country: France
Let's be truthful - the musical genre is an all-too American affair. It's hardly surprising when you take a peek into every single 'Best Musical' poll around the planet and you'll be pressed to find that they're all American. Or at least financed by Uncle Sam's currency. So when a foreign musical comes along, it gets snubbed or flippantly pushed back into the depths catalogue oblivion. Which is a shame, because Jacques Demy's Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, his follow-up to the luminous Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, is an exuberant, joyous homage to the Hollywood musical genre - complete with romantic abandon, Technicolour bombast, radiant choreography and titillating songs - that for a momentary consideration, the Americans should be pleased with the cinematic gesture. Nevertheless, the collaboration of Demy and his wife Agnès Varda remains self-consciously French, that it's understandably too hard for them to betray the nouvelle vague which they belong to. The result is glorious musical filmmaking.
This may be Cherbourg's twin sister, but whereas Cherbourg is more technically daring as an all-sung romantic opera and bears a more melancholic, wistful tone, Rochefort is the exact opposite. Effusive, jubilant and formally reverent to the genre, Rochefort is essentially a film about dreams, love and hope. It's a tale about small-town idyll, where twin sisters Delphine and Solange (played by real life twins Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac respectively) yearn to leave Rochefort and hit the big-town Paris. The entire film takes place in a long weekend, and the roving narrative weaves upon the lives of the town's folks; the lovelorn mother, the quixotic sailor in search for his 'feminine ideal' (played by a very young Jacques Perrin), the besotted American visitor (Hollywood musical legend Gene Kelly in a cameo role), the toe-tapping twosome and the nostalgic piano dealer. Unlike the traditional Hollywood narrative, Demy does not focus on any protagonist, or the two heroines for that matter, but allows these miniature stories to mesh with each other in often complex intersections and teasingly beautiful interplay of time and missed opportunities. Rochefort is a French film through and through. It glorifies life yet never forgetting reality, and in the end, it seems to imply that we are all part of a bigger tapestry, and whilst shit happens, love will conquer all.
An exquisitely, eloquently made nouvelle vague musical. Where Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is a love song to lost love and broken dreams, his follow-up Les Demoiselles de Rochefort is a hopeful chanson to love found and regained where characters cannot help but sing their hearts out. This is French film magic.
Review by The Moviejerk © Janz
