Les parapluies de Cherbourg

Jacques Demy (1964)

Even now, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is extraordinary; in 1964, Jacques Demy’s romantic drama must have seemed entirely sui generis.  As far as I know, a sung-through movie musical was pretty well unprecedented – and it’s hard to think that any film had looked quite like this one.  It features probably the most famous collection of wallpapers in cinema history – most vividly and variously in the supposedly modest apartment where the teenage heroine Geneviève Emery (Catherine Deneuve) lives with her widowed mother (Anne Vernon):  the colours and patterns of their dresses are sometimes co-ordinated with the wallpapers.  These are also conspicuous, though more muted, in the home that Geneviève’s boyfriend Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo) shares with his invalid aunt (Mireille Perrey).  Well into the film, Guy, at his lowest ebb, picks up a prostitute and they go back to her boudoir.  The wallpaper there is quite something too.  In fact, the interiors are never less than eye-catching, even when there’s only paint on the walls – even in the garage where, at the start of the story, Guy works as a mechanic.

Yet Demy and his DP Jacques Rabier repeatedly take an interesting journey to reach the highly stylised décor (created by an art direction team led by Bernard Evain).  Each of the narrative’s three parts begins with entirely realistic images, of the Cherbourg sea front.  The camera then moves inland, and in the direction of stylisation, onto a street in the town and the shops there.  They include Mme Emery’s umbrella boutique (which gives Demy his title).  The three ‘acts’ – ‘The Departure’, ‘The Absence’ and ‘The Return’ – are precisely dated, which serves to underline the film’s realistic aspect.  This is particularly so in the second and third parts, when the screen indicates specific months, marking the passage of time in Guy’s military service in Algeria, then in Genevieve’s pregnancy.  The main action starts in late 1957 and ends in the first half of 1959.  A final episode, so dramatically and emotionally crucial that it’s anything but a postscript, takes place at Christmas 1963.

Even within the film musical genre, the line between absurdity and entrancement can rarely have been finer than it is in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – at least in the early stages.  The challenge of adjusting to recitative is sharpened by Demy’s setting the opening scene in Guy’s workplace, where he and the garage owner Aubin (Jean Champion) sing lines like ‘The engine still knocks when it’s cold but that’s normal’ and ‘Check the ignition on the gentleman’s Mercedes’.  (Demy also wrote the screenplay.)  As the obstacles to Geneviève’s romantic happiness with Guy increase, the juxtaposition of emotional distress and candy-coloured interior decoration also threatens to topple into inadvertent comedy but it never does, thanks to Michel Legrand’s insistent, limited, haunting melodies and to the supernal beauty of the main cast.

Umbrellas is perhaps unique in that, since none of them does their own singing, we rarely hear the principals’ actual voices[1].  But these performers are so alluringly expressive that their physical presence is more than enough.  This is most obviously true of the spectacular leads – twenty-year-old Catherine Deneuve and the young Italian actor Nino Castelnuovo – but Anne Vernon’s highly entertaining Mme Emery is the embodiment of chic.  It’s a mark of the level of good looks Demy seems to have required that Ellen Farner and Marc Michel, in what are conceived as relatively unglamorous roles, are, respectively, very pretty and strikingly handsome.  Farner is Madeleine, the dutiful girl who cares for Guy’s bedridden aunt.  Michel is the jeweller Roland Cassard.  Madeleine carries a torch for Guy throughout, and eventually marries him – after Geneviève has wed Roland.  His wallet has already saved Mme Emery’s failing business.  When Guy, who knows that Geneviève is carrying his child, goes incommunicado during his time in Algeria, Mme Emery draws her own conclusions.  She persuades her daughter to do the sensible thing and accept Roland’s marriage proposal.

Lovelorn Roland Cassard, who agrees to take on the responsibility of another man’s child, is also a character in Lola (1960) – the first and only non-musical part of Demy’s ‘romantic trilogy’, which The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) followed.  I haven’t seen Lola but this second viewing of Umbrellas reinforced the puzzle of how I can like it so much but find Rochefort, for which Michel Legrand also wrote the music, an abomination[2].  I think there are probably three main, interlinked reasons.  Both films may have been stimulated by Hollywood musical romances, and Demy’s love of them, but Umbrellas, unlike Rochefort, is small-scale, tells an intimate story with dramatic pressure, and has an ingeniously grown-up ending.  (Although this may have inspired, more than half a century later, the ending of La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s synthetic musical seems more thoroughly influenced by The Young Girls of Rochefort.)

In the carefree early days of their relationship, Geneviève and Guy imagine the child they’ll have together.  She says it will be a girl called Françoise.  He wants a boy called François.  Both dreams come true, though not in the way the couple expects.  Their love child is a girl and Geneviève gives her the name Françoise but Roland is her de facto father.  It’s Madeleine who gives birth to Guy’s son François.  At the end of the film, Guy is running his own garage, bought with his aunt’s inheritance.  It’s evening and Madeleine takes François (Hervé Legrand, Michel’s son) out to see the Cherbourg Christmas lights.  Soon after they’ve gone, a car pulls up at the garage.  The driver is Geneviève, returning to Cherbourg for the first time in several years.  Little Françoise (Rosalie Varda, Demy’s daughter) is in the passenger seat beside her.

I’d remembered that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg didn’t end happily but not the details.  For a minute or so, I thought Demy had botched it.  When Geneviève and Guy clap eyes on each other again, for the first time since he left for military service, both leads seem to under-react.  Then Guy invites Geneviève to come into the garage and she does so while the child stays in the car.  As the former lovers talk, without evident emotion, the harsh truth of the reunion that you’ve anticipated so eagerly starts to sink in.  You’re primed for it to be momentous, in light of the intense romanticism of what’s gone before.  In the event, the reunion is perfunctory and has to be:  so much has changed.  Guy failed to reply to Geneviève’s letters to Algeria not because he wanted to avoid paternal responsibility for the baby she was expecting but because he was injured and in hospital.  Even so, it makes rather devastating sense that he now doesn’t pay much attention to the daughter who can’t actually be his.

Wearing a fur coat and a stylish hairdo, Geneviève looks rich and unhappy but it’s somewhat baffling when Guy asks her, on the basis of her appearance, if she’s in mourning.  She is, though.  The news that her vivacious, early middle-aged mother has died adds startlingly to the melancholy of the scene and to our realisation that the youngsters at the start of the story have grown up and older.  Perhaps there’s a particular impact here for a generation of Anglophone viewers who, like me, grew up in the 1960s hearing not Jacques Demy’s libretto but the English lyrics of numbers derived from Michel Legrand’s score – especially the main love theme.  This became ‘I Will Wait for You’ and the message of that song – ‘If it takes forever I will wait for you’ – acquires an ironic charge in the film’s finale, which demonstrates the impossibility of such a commitment, thanks to the operation of chance and force of circumstance.  The past is irrecoverable.  Geneviève and Françoise drive off.  Madeleine and François return home.  Demy uses the idealising qualities of his picture to pull the rug from under the audience – even though the visuals are prettified to the last.  In the closing shots of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Guy and his young son play together in the snow that’s fallen for Christmas.  Amusingly modernised by the Esso signage in the background, this is nevertheless a lovely, traditional, happy-family image.  Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?  It’s a brilliant ending.

12 December 2019

[1] The main singers are Danielle Licari (Geneviève); José Bartel (Guy); Christiane Legrand, the composer’s sister (Mme Emery); Georges Blanes (Roland Cassard); Claudine Meunier (Madeleine); Claire Leclerc (Guy’s aunt).

[2] It’s the next free DVD the BFI will be sending to Champion members, as one of our regular perks.  For the first time, I’ve asked to receive the ‘reserve’ alternative.  This is Varda by Agnès, the cinema envoi of Jacques Demy’s widow.