Illustration by Michael DiMilo
★★★★1/2
Musical History: Review of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
By Geoff Carter
The big-budget Hollywood movie musical, probably the gold standard by which the genre is measured, was notoriously and unabashedly larger than life. An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, Gigi, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and of course The Wizard of Oz took audiences into larger-than-life worlds and spectacular stories of the exotic and fantastic. These movies were bright, beautiful, colorful, and incredibly popular.
The genre thrives today. From Disney classics like Snow White, Cinderella, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Frozen to the darker and more adult-themed later musicals like West Side Story, Cabaret, and today’s Emilia Perez to the recently released Wicked, the larger-than-life musical has more than survived the test of time.
We recently had the opportunity to see the restored version of 1964’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a groundbreaking musical and the second of George Demy’s informal trilogy of romantic musicals, including Lola (1961) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). Instead of traditional method of inserting directly into the storyline, composer Michel LeGrand wrote the entire film in recitative, a style in which actors are allowed to use natural styles of speech and enunciation while delivering lines—sort of like an informal opera.
The story opens as young lovers Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) and Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) go out on the town. Guy is a mechanic, and Genevieve works at her mother Madame Emery (Anna Vernon)’s umbrella shop. Madly in love, the two talk of marriage. Madame Emery tries to discourage Genevieve, telling her she is too young and reminding her Guy has yet to complete his military service. When Guy is inducted into the army, the two have a final tryst which results in Genevieve becoming pregnant.
While Guy is fighting in Algiers, Genevieve becomes lonely and frustrated, worried that Guy does not write often enough. In desperate financial straits, Mme. Emery tries to sell a necklace to a local jeweler, who cannot help. Another buyer, Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) is smitten with Genevieve and offers to help out. He proposes marriage, offering to raise the child as his own. Reluctantly, at her mother’s urging, Genevieve accepts.
Guy returns to find the umbrella shop closed and that Genevieve has moved away. Heartbroken, he loses his job and, when his godmother dies, he turns to her caregiver Madeleine (Ellen Farner) for solace. With the inheritance from his godmother, Guy opens an American-type garage and marries Madeleine, despite her doubts that he may still love Genevieve.
Four years later, at Christmas, a car pulls up to the garage. Genevieve and her daughter Francoise are inside. She sees Guy and the two go inside to chat, each saying they are happy. She asks is Guy wants to meet his daughter. He says no, she drives off, and Guy happily greets Madeleine and their son as they return from seeing Santa Claus.
While the plotline is as thin as most other musicals, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was an atypical movie for its time. The settings are small, intimate, almost claustrophobic, and instead of a huge story with a cast of thousands, Guy and Genevieve’s story is a quiet and personal one. The entirety of the dialogue is set to music. In most musicals, the transition to a song signals a baring of a character’s innermost feelings, almost a sort of internal monologue.
In Umbrellas, everything is sung and therefore everything in Genevieve’s soul is laid bare, especially the ecstatic cloud occupied by her and Guy. The first chapter of the film is devoted to them, as if they are the only people in the world. The vibrant colors nearly leap off the screen, and Deneuve’s angelic beauty seems otherworldly. Despite the groundedness of Mme. Emery and Guy’s Aunt Elise, the two lovers seem to float above all else.
Leveraged as most of the scenes are into tight inside spaces—as opposed to the vast areas and sets used in other musicals of that time like The Sound of Music, Oklahoma, and West Side Story—the relationship between the two lovers is emphasized and their emotional depth strengthened.
After Guy leaves, this spatial tightness underlines Genevieve’s sense of confinement and frustration. Her pregnancy and her love for Guy are tying her down. When Roland enters the picture and her mother encourages her to accept the hand of the man she does not live, Genevieve accepts. In a beautiful scene at a wedding shop, Mme. Emery walks past a number of mannequin heads covered with bridal veils which makes her look as if she’s walking through a delicate fog. At the end of the line is Genevieve, who slowly lifts the veil. She escapes.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is an intensely personal study of the fragility and ephemeral nature of first love and instead of glamorizing or mythologizing this experience, it presents the transience of that first marvelous onslaught of feeling, desire, and wonder as only one in a never-ending series of life experiences. For all its tropes and clever devices, Umbrellas is probably one of the most emotionally realistic musicals ever made. It is charming and beautiful—like first love—but it is also bittersweet and even brutally realistic.
The opening title sequence is a perfect metaphor for this. The camera moves from a long shot of the Cherbourg harbor, then cranes up to look down at pedestrians passing by in the rain. The umbrellas they hold appear as multi-colored circles passing over the dingy cobblestones. The colored circles, some bright, some dingy, some faded pastels, pass underneath our view in seemingly random patterns—much as our lives and loves move in seemingly random patterns.
The 4K restoration of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is now playing in select theaters. It is a treat to see this beautiful version on the big screen. If you get a chew, pass by the latest Marvel megahit or dopey romcom and take in a true classic of the cinema.
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