TOM's Film Club: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) Film / Cinema

A huge influence on Damien Chazelle’s modern musical La La Land, Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is both charming and melancholic.

The musical genre is one of the more popular pastimes for film-goers looking for some escapism, but few were as realist, mature or as bittersweet as Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: rather than have a few musical numbers sung sporadically throughout the film to express dreams and emotions, Demy abandoned spoken dialogue in his film and instead had his characters communicate exclusively through song. Although unconventional, the music here draws us even deeper into the story and the players involved, whose emotions now seem even more honest, strong and real, because mere words couldn’t do them justice before. It is to composer Michel Legrand’s great credit that he was able to create such a lush score that reflected the feelings of the characters, without being too sentimental; in particular the main theme ‘I Will Wait For You,’ with lyrics written by Demy, was a song as hopeful as it was pessimistic.

Told in three parts, the film is the love story between Geneviève, played beautifully and brilliantly by Catherine Deneuve, an employee of her mother’s umbrella shop, and Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), a mechanic who will soon be going off to war, and thus potentially straining their whirlwind romance. A huge influence on Damien Chazelle’s modern musical La La Land, Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is both charming and melancholic, and while it did add some colour to the mostly black and white films being made at the time of La Nouvelle Vague, his musical was still very much grounded in a sombre reality like the films of his contemporaries.

“[The Umbrellas of Cherbourg] is remembered as a bold original experiment, and now that it is restored and back in circulation, it can also be remembered as a surprisingly effective film, touching and knowing and, like Deneuve, ageless.” Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Venue: The Old Market, 11a Upper Market Street, Hove, BN3 1AS

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