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Songs in the Key of Everyday Life

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed and written by Jacques Demy

With Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner,Mireille Perrey, and Harald Wolff.

By Jonathan Rosenbaum (Published on 17 May 1996)

Let’s put it this way: It’s 1957, and a 20-year-old garage mechanic in Cherbourg knocks up his

girlfriend just before he leaves for two years of military service in Algeria. Guy Foucher and

Genevieve Emery–the daughter of a middle-class widow who helps her mother run a chicumbrella shop–make a handsome and devoted couple, and they swear eternal love to each other

before he leaves, but he writes to her only infrequently. When Genevieve finds herself pregnant,

her financially strapped mother, who’s never approved of her relationship with Guy, virtually

stage-manages a proposal from a visiting diamond merchant who’s already helped her out of a

financial crisis. By the time Guy returns from Algeria with a pronounced limp (the reason he

didn’t write), Genevieve has married the diamond merchant and moved to Paris, and the

umbrella shop has closed, to be replaced by a store selling washing machines.

As luck would have it, I first saw Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) about two years too early–

before my first trip to France. I didn’t have a clue about how faithful it is to everyday French life.

I’d already seen and enjoyed at least a couple of Jacques Demy movies by then: his ravishingfirst feature, Lola (1960), one of the seminal works of the French New Wave, as well as his

charming sketch on “la luxure” in The Seven Capital Sins, one of the long-forgotten portmanteau

features of that era. My trouble with Demy began with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and with its

alleged charm. A completely sung movie with music by Michel Legrand, it can’t truly be called a

musical, an opera, or even an operetta, though it borrows elements from all three. But to my taste

at the time, it was a commercial sellout, positively cloying in its calculated charm–a sentimental

festival of gaudy pastels (it was Demy’s first film in color) that cried out for mainstream

acceptance, and even had the brass to feature an Esso station prominently in the final sequences,

a case of unabashed product placement if there ever was one. When the movie was nominated for

an Oscar–something that had never happened with any genuine New Wave pictures, only with

corny pretenders like Black Orpheus, Sundays and Cybele, and A Man and a Woman–Iconcluded that the nomination only proved my point.

What a dunderhead I was. Moreover, my misunderstanding of Demy’s achievement was shared

by many others. In this country people got the idea that Demy was a minor director, and kept that

belief for the remainder of his career. I began to suspect the error of my ways only when I caught

Demy’s extravagant 1966 Umbrellas spin-off in third or fourth run, during my second summer

trip to Paris–The Young Girls of Rochefort, an unabashed musical with an even better Legrand

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score, featuring Gene Kelly, George Chakiris, and Grover Dale (not to mention Catherine

Deneuve and her sister Francoise Dorleac). By that time I’d seen enough of everyday French life

to realize that Demy was very far from offering a saccharine treatment of it, that he was up to

something much more complicated and profound. His poetic exaltation of the ordinary, bursting

with emotion, had its share of dark irony as well as respect, and whether or not it was set to

music, it was far more rooted in reality than I’d been willing to admit.

During my first visit to France I looked up a former teacher, who was working the night shift at a

local newspaper in Rouen, and when I accompanied him to work one evening I was amazed to

see him shake hands with every one of his coworkers when he arrived. I soon discovered that this

kind of formality is also present in the everyday speech patterns of the French, who trot out

formulas on all sorts of occasions: they’re just as common in intimate conversations between

lovers and close relatives as they are between coworkers or between clerks and customers.

Almost in its entirety, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a heartfelt, passionate, tragic musical suite

made up of these formulas, which the film both celebrates and wryly examines to discover their

inner logic: how they actually work, what they do and don’t do.

Here’s another way of putting it: the very first lines of dialogue in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,

all of them sung to big-band jazz, have in themselves a formal, almost musical rhythm. The

setting is a garage, where the rain–which started behind the credits–is still falling. The camera

keeps tracking back and forth, first with a customer, then with Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), as each

looks out at the rain then returns to the garage interior. (The following translation is mine.)

Customer (returning to the garage): “Finished yet?”

Guy (working on car): “Yep. The engine still rattles when it gets cold, but that’s usual.”

Customer: “Thanks.”

Guy: “Thank you.”

Boss (in the background): “Foucher–could you stay an extra hour tonight?”

Guy: “Tonight would be a problem. But I think Pierre’s free. Pierre–could you stay later

tonight?”

Pierre: “Yes.”

Boss (to Pierre): “Check the ignition of the gentleman’s Mercedes.”

It’s the most normal talk in the world. But because this is France, where even everyday talk is

formalized, it has a strong rhythmic pattern in the original French–the way the customer and Guy

say merci to each other, for instance, or the way the two uses of ce soir (”tonight”) and the

Foucher and Pierre pair off like rhymes. Singing this somewhat musical everyday speech merely

places its formal aspect in higher relief.

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Guy, as it happens, can’t stay an extra hour because he has a date with Genevieve (Catherine

Deneuve) to see the opera Carmen–something an American mechanic would be unlikely to see

(though one of Guy’s cohorts in the washroom remarks twice that he prefers movies to opera). It

all seems very normal. Yet someone seeing the movie a second time may note that the gentleman

with the black Mercedes whose ignition needs checking is none other than Roland Cassard (Marc

Michel), the diamond merchant who later marries Genevieve but whom Guy never meets. (Nor isthis the only strange confluence in Demy’s universe: Cassard, played by the same actor, is also a

major character in Lola, a fact that’s alluded to directly much later in Umbrellas; even Legrand’s

lovely main theme for Lola is appropriated here.)

Why this preoccupation with normal life? We learn from Agnes Varda, Demy’s wife, in her

loving film portrait of her late husband’s childhood, Jacquot de Nantes, that Demy’s father

worked in a garage just like Guy’s. But this furnishes only one piece of the puzzle. Demy’s

fixation on everyday life–especially family life–has, I think, psychosexual roots much deeper

than the facts of his biography. The only real counterpart to Demy I can think of is the Japanese

master Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963). His thematic and formal preoccupations also converge in a

system of quotidian rituals–not only rituals like getting married, going off to war, having kids,and losing or finding work but also such minor rituals as saying “Good morning” and “Thank

you.” One of Ozu’s sublime late films, Good Morning, is very much concerned with that

particular salutation–as is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which has more than its share of

bonjours, each one musically placed.

Another parallel between Demy and Ozu, and one not widely known, is that both were gay men

living in highly formalized middle-class societies where “coming out” was not regarded as a

viable option. (One would have to say that Demy was bisexual, perhaps, because he fathered

children with Varda; he died of complications arising from AIDS in 1990.) Their fascination with

“normal” family life was thus emotionally and philosophically complex–their views both

idealized and ironic, bitterly tragic and stringently comic, because they came at least in part fromthe vantage point of outsiders who chose to express themselves in mainstream terms. It may say

something about the difference between Japan and France–as well as the difference between Ozu

and Demy as artists–that Ozu’s films are full of father figures and Demy’s are more often bereft

of them (with a few exceptions in the latter portion of his career). But their views of the human

condition are surprisingly similar. (Viewers who don’t want to know the whole story of The

Umbrellas of Cherbourg are advised to step off here.)

Returning from Algeria in 1959 and finding Genevieve gone, Guy quits his job at the garage to

live on his military pension. At loose ends, he’s almost as much of an emotional mess as the

young veteran of the Algerian war from Boulogne in Alain Resnais’ Muriel (1963)–perhaps the

only other major French film of the period to deal with the traumatic effect of that war on Frenchcivilian life, an effect that in many ways was echoed by the impact of the Vietnam war on

America a few years later. (Muriel is likewise preoccupied with small-town life and everyday

rituals, and it has formal parallels with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as well: just after Guy and

Genevieve go to bed together, for the first and only time, there are rhythmic cuts to three

locations, now empty, where we’d previously seen them, in a manner that explicitly recalls not

only Muriel but the final sequence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Eclipse, made in 1962.)

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After spending a night with a prostitute, Guy discovers that his devoted Aunt Elise (Mireille

Perrey) has died during his absence. He inherits enough money from her to buy an Esso station

in town and winds up marrying Madeleine (Ellen Farner), the young woman who took care of his

aunt.

We move ahead to Christmas 1963 (about six weeks prior to the Paris premiere of the film): Guyand Madeleine are trimming the Christmas tree inside the office of their Esso station. They have

a little boy now, and snow is falling in heaps (another ironic “rhyme,” this one with the equally

artificial and stylized rainfall of the opening sequence). Madeleine and the boy, Francois, go out

for a walk, and Genevieve pulls up in the black Mercedes with her little girl, Francoise–Guy’s

daughter. Recognizing Genevieve with a start, Guy invites her into the office. She says that this

is her first trip to Cherbourg since her marriage; she’s bringing Francoise back from a visit with

her paternal grandmother, she says, and adds that her mother has died. She asks if Guy wants to

see Francoise, and he replies, “I think you’d better go.” Their parting exchange couldn’t be more

banal: Toi, tout va bien? Oui, tres bien. (”Are things going well with you?” “Yes, very well.”) In

long shot, she drives off just as Madeleine and Francois return from their walk; Guy briefly plays

with Francois in the snow, then all three enter the office as the camera cranes up into the sky.

The name of the Esso station is Escale Cherbourgeoise; this means literally “Cherbourgian

Stopover,” but if we consider that escalader means “to scale or to climb” and escalier means

“stairway,” we can read traces of a buried pun: “a bourgeois step up.” Guy has become

comfortably middle-class, Genevieve has become upper-class, and the class difference between

them seems even more unbridgeable than it was before. And as for the Esso sign that gave me so

much trouble, what better indication could there be of the Americanization of small-town France,

a simple fact of everyday life that this movie treats like any other? Product placement or not, it

has the ring of absolute truth.

For all the apparent sugar and spice of Legrand’s memorable score and for all the candy-coloredwallpaper, Demy’s social observation in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg couldn’t be more clear-

eyed. (Twenty years later, Demy’s class awareness and political consciousness were even more

overt in Une chambre a ville, an original opera about a strike of naval workers set in Nantes in

the mid-50s. Written without Legrand, it may have been his final masterpiece.) Demy charts with

withering accuracy the steps that Genevieve’s mother (Anne Vernon) takes to snare the diamond

merchant–a process that begins even before she discovers Genevieve is pregnant. But Demy

doesn’t view the process satirically or even judgmentally; he’s simply observing in detail the way

French people behave in such situations.

This describes the content of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but the style can’t be labeled realistic

even if one ignores the music. Aiming for a heightened reality to set off the more mundanereality of his characters, Demy and his set designer, Bernard Evein, repainted whole sections of

Cherbourg so that the colors would be much more vivid and coordinated than they were in real

life; a similar approach is evident in the costumes.

This heightening of visual detail is the counterpart of the heightening of emotions and the

sharpening of form achieved by setting the dialogue to music. (Though Legrand isn’t credited as

the film’s cowriter, his collaboration with Demy, who wrote the lyrics, suggests that he may well

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deserve to be, for this is a film in which the score and the narrative are inseparable, shaped to the

same architecture. Demy once noted that Umbrellas should be described as a film “in song” the

way that some films are “in color.”) Jean-Pierre Berthome, who wrote the only book about Demy

I’m aware of–the beautifully observed and richly detailed Jacques Demy: Les racines du reve

(1982)–aptly notes that when Guy and Genevieve sit together in a cafe on their last evening

together, even the drinks they’ve ordered (”Genevieve’s amber aperitif, Guy’s canary yellowpastis”) are color-coordinated with everything else in the scene. Demy’s visual orchestration is

the perfect complement to Legrand’s musical orchestration; both create a powerful emotional

intensification that perfects or contradicts the banality of the dialogue.

A friend of mine once noted that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of Demy’s five

masterpieces, but the weakest of the five; the four others he cited were Lola, The Bay of the

Angels (1962), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), and Une chambre a ville (1982).

(Berthome writes: “I don’t know if…The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is Jacques Demy’s most

beautiful film. What I’m sure of is that it’s the most perfect, certainly the one that’s most faithful

to the least of its intentions.”) I’m less sure than my friend that The Bay of the Angels is a

masterpiece; I haven’t seen it in years but remember it as campy, particularly in its glamorizedtreatment of Jeanne Moreau, in ways the other four are not. But The Young Girls of Rochefort

has filled me with such unreasoning rapture–especially after I saw it in 70-millimeter several

years ago–that I doubt Umbrellas will ever supplant it as my favorite, even in the vibrantly

colored 1992 restoration by Varda and Legrand, remixed with Dolby stereo, now showing at the

Music Box. (There are English-dubbed versions of both Umbrellas and Young Girls; I haven’t

seen the latter, but the English version of Umbrellas is so unrelievedly awful that I’m happy to

have missed the dubbed Young Girls.) It would be wonderful if this restored version of

Umbrellas, which has had an enormous success in New York, did well enough elsewhere to make

the restoration and U.S. release of The Young Girls of Rochefort feasible; it has never received

anything approaching its due here (for all I know, it may have appeared here only in its dubbed

form).

The problem with such lists is that no American I know, including my friend, has seen all of

Demy’s work, which includes many partial or outright failures. Among the features, the partial

failures I’ve seen are Model Shop (1969, filmed in Los Angeles–his only American movie,

providing a fascinating take on this country, it’s been unavailable for decades), his fairy-tale

musical Peau d’ane (1970, Donkey Skin), and his last film, shown at the Chicago International

Film Festival several years back, Trois places pour le 26 (1988, Three Seats for the 26th, a

Legrand musical that stars Yves Montand as himself). The only outright failure I’ve seen is The

Slightly Pregnant Man (1973), though some have told me that The Pied Piper (1972) and Lady

Oscar (1979) are comparably weak. But even this list leaves out the 1980 TV feature La

naissance du jour (a Colette adaptation), the 1985 Parking (a non-Legrand musical), and the 1988La table tournante. I’ve recently heard from separate sources that (a) the Chicago Film Festival

plans a Claude Chabrol retrospective this year, and (b) because decent prints are unavailable,

such a plan is virtually impossible. If this project falls by the wayside, could a Demy

retrospective conceivably be an alternative? The fact that neither The Young Girls of Rochefort

nor Une chambre a ville is available in the United States, even on video, means that The

Umbrellas of Cherbourg, for all its power, gives an incomplete sense of Demy at his best.

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Both Chabrol and Demy have been unjustifiably eclipsed in this country, in part because their

oeuvres are uneven. But if filmmakers are ranked according to their best work rather than their

midlevel output, Demy is comparable in stature not only to Chabrol but even to Francois

Truffaut. As entertainers, Truffaut and Chabrol are both clearly superior to Demy; but if one

looks only at the greatest works of these three, it seems to me self-evident that Lola, The

Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort, and Une chambre a ville can standunabashedly alongside such films as Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and

Jim, and The Green Room and Chabrol’s Les bonnes femmes, La femme infidele, Que la bete

meure, and Le boucher.

If you doubt my words, check out the new 16-millimeter print of Lola that the Music Box is

showing this Saturday and Sunday, or rent the letterboxed video sometime to get a taste of what

you’ve been missing. Several critics have noted that Demy made a tactical error by launching his

career with Lola, a movie so masterful that everything else he did would have to build on it. (It

even has music by Legrand.) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one such edifice, and it’s a glorious

sight to behold–though don’t forget to listen as well.

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