The poignant pastel melancholy that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg leaves its viewer with is best laid out by Kurt Vonnegut: “I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heartbreaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.” The most striking feature of the film was that there wasn’t a single spoken line: all the dialogue, even the shortest phrases, is sung by the characters. This experimental direction, which was called film chanteur, allowed director Jacques Demy to blur the boundaries between two art forms: opera and cinema.
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This “light opera of the semi-swinging French 60s” is designated as “one of the most famous non-Hollywood musicals of all time” by The Guardian. The film turned out to be incredibly successful in France and worldwide, instantly becoming a classic and introducing Catherine Deneuve to a wider audience. It was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Film, Best Song, Best Soundtrack, and Best Original Screenplay — and won three awards at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival, including the coveted Palme d’Or.
Coming after Lola and before The Young Girls of Rochefort, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is the second installment in Jacques Demy’s informal romantic trilogy that shares some of the same actors, characters, and overall style. Jim Ridley, the Nashville Scene editor, wrote about the film for The Criterion Collection, writing that this movie musical is “the most affecting of movie musicals, and perhaps the fullest expression of [Demy’s] career-long fascination with the entwining of real life, chance, and the bewitching artifice of cinematic illusion.”
Why The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is an Important Classic
20th Century Fox
Jacques Demy was an avid representative of the French New Wave, exploring the seemingly old-age simplicity and simultaneous complexity of human relations: love and fidelity, separation, longing, longing for distant lands, and small joys of provincial life. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg rightfully became a 60s movie musical classic, as it revolutionized the genre: Demy’s work was the first movie musical that featured zero spoken dialogue.
The owner of the garage sings, negotiating the flight; the driver sings while pouring gasoline; a man lying in bed, a paralyzed old woman — everyone sings. Gradually, the viewer gets used to the melodic recitative and considers it a natural manner of dialogue, especially in view of young love, which has its own charming musical theme. The discordance of the most mundane phrases like “I’m going to lock up the store” sung dramatically has a comedic effect. Laughter, however, doesn’t negate the sympathy, but just keeps the viewer and the author on the verge of sentimentality and self-irony.
It was also Demy’s first color film, so he went all out. Once, he even appears on the screen, peeking into The Umbrellas of Cherbourg store to ask where the paint store is, perhaps referencing just how colorful this all is.
The world created by the decorator Bernard Even impresses with its brightness and intensity of shades, the color palette greatly inspired by Matisse’s canvases. Saturated, almost artificial scenery serves as a backdrop for rather banal and sad events. Thus, the colors here work as a counterpoint to the tragedy of life, practically a metaphor for cinema and art itself. Costumes were carefully chosen to support the story and often matched the color of the set’s furnishings: the print on Madame Emery’s terry dressing gown echoes the pink and green wallpaper; Geneviève’s milky coat fits right with the houses in the port town of Cherbourg. The merging of the clothes and wallpaper here symbolizes the acceptance of the inevitable and humility.
Umbrellas Was so Unusual That it Almost Didn’t Happen
While working on the film, the legendary composer Michel Legrand realized that the transitions from dialogue to music and vice versa just didn’t work. The project paused for two months until Demy came up with the idea of going full singing.
In addition to having no speaking words, The Umbrellas is one of the most interesting examples of working with color in world cinema, and at the time of the release of the picture was surprisingly experimental. This very experimental nature of the film almost ended up fatal as producers refused to work on the project. The ‘war’ lasted a year until Pierre Lazareff, an influential media mogul and publisher, intervened. He said he didn’t understand the red scene but he’s sure that it’d jolt the audience, so he wanted to pay for it to happen.
The role of Geneviève was written for a Eurovision winner, but she ended up in a horrific car accident and was battling for her life. Then Demy found the rising star Catherine Deneuve who was perfect for the role, bringing incredible sensibility to the character, but was a horrible singer. In the end, Demy decided to resort to dubbing.
The First Musical About Class Struggle
Demy wanted to create an idealization of everyday life. Every shot looks like a postcard or a picture from an illustrated magazine, highly aestheticized, enlightened, and elevated, turning vulgarity into beauty and art. Here is the same estrangement and self-irony of the all-singing approach. The colors are too bold, and the rooms are too clean and beautiful, while the outfits are perfectly ironed and coordinated.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is the name of the shop where the story starts. It sounds both sweet and funny, with a touch of good-natured irony over some provincial chic: “Cherbourg umbrellas” are just like “New York skyscrapers” or “Egyptian pyramids."
On the one hand, the picture belongs to the genre of sentimental melodrama. On the other, through the prism of a frivolous, even a little caricature (Geneviève’s suitor, the jeweler Roland Cassard looks like a parody of a person of the “highest class”), the problems of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie are shown. A paraphrase of a well-known revolutionary principle here characterizes the attitude of various social classes towards love in particular and towards life in general.
The characters find themselves hostage to the situation — the magic is broken when Guy is sent to serve in the army. Being far from his beloved, the young man consoles himself with the hope of a happy future together, while Geneviève is forced to give in to her mother, who is eager to marry her daughter to well-off Roland. Fiery romanticism is opposed to sober cynicism. Having shown everyday reality as solemnly as possible (emphasis on the everyday mundanity of the dialogue from characters diligently performing song parts), Demy, together with Legrand, created a truly unique work.
A Love Story Without the Happy Ending
In the 1960s, unhappy endings in love stories were uncharacteristic. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg concludes with Geneviève and Guy meeting again, but their reunion is awkward and absolutely heartbreaking — and they part ways, never to see each other again. The story is all the more meaningful and moving for it, as Anastasia Brown writes: “Despite the constant appearance of saturated happiness seen in the sets and costumes, change is inevitable."
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg has been referenced many times since its release, the most prominent example being one of the best recent musicals, La La Land. Its vivid costumes and doll-house-like sets juxtaposed with a bittersweet ending with the main characters going their separate ways reminisce Demy’s work greatly, with Damien Chazelle proclaiming that he has watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg more than 200 times.
This movie musical leaves a deep impression, as above all it’s also a story about growing up, a melancholic take on how the inexorable passage of time destroys even the firmest and brightest hopes. After all, the villain of the story is not Roland or Geneviève’s mother but the harsh reality. Perhaps the characters managed to find their own happiness, leaving the dream that never became a reality behind?
