Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Another interesting movie is Jacques Demy's 1964 "Umbrellas of Cherbourg." I had no idea what the title was about when I first heard it. I thought it must be something symbolic. However, it just refers to the fact that one of the main characters lives and works in an umbrella shop in the port city of Cherbourg, France with her widowed mother.

I suppose it might tie into the fact that umbrellas were then already being made in many different and bright colors. Not only do the mother and daughter sell such umbrellas, but the movie uses as its color scheme for clothing, wall paper and other things all of these wildly bright pinks, blues, purples, yellows, greens, etc. It is a harmlessly strange, technicolor fantasy world - a kind of homage to an old Hollywood meets just pre-Hippie early to mid-sixties when bright colors were starting to come in. (This is in contrast to the movie that Demy made just before, "Lola," which starred the famous European actress Anouk Amee and is referred to in this movie. "Lola" was in stark black and white.) The color on the original copies had faded, but Demy had saved negatives (I think for the three different primary colors) and the movie in all of its bright colors was restored by the Koch Lorber laboratories sometime in the 90's.

Far more interesting to me is that every line of the movie is sung. It is a modern opera. Demy employed the then still fairly unknown Michel Legrand who went on to compose such famous emotive hits as "Windmills of Your Mind" and "What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your Life?" There are two famous hit songs out of this movie: "(If It Takes Forever) I Will Wait for You" and "See What Happens." Legrand shows that he is more than just a tunesmith as he composes the music "in between" the hit songs, what would be called the "recitative" in an opera. Actually, I find this music to be more interesting as Legrand gets into some more sophisticated jazz and Latin styles and handles them rather deftly. This music is not so over-the-top emotionally.

A very interesting thing is that, even though the music can be heard as divided into recitative and aria - as in a traditional opera - the text isn't written that way. Not only are there all sorts of trivial lines like "the engine doesn't knock anymore except when it is cold," and "do you want super or regular?" (something which you might expect in a recitative section) the aria (song) texts are like that as well. Moreover, the song texts aren't strophic with a repeated number of syllables per verse with rhyme. The composer has to sometimes cram all sorts of syllables into the melody the second time around to get things to fit. It works, basically, but in a very unconventional way. The English versions of these songs that we know are very loose translations which capture the basic mood but which are cast in a much more conventional poetic form.

Anyway, I won't say much about the plot except that, modern opera or not, like most operas it is an excuse for the music. The libretto is so-so and a very sentimental tear-jerker, the plot is very poorly developed in places. It is basically about two young people who think they are in love and do something very dumb to mess up their lives. They end up marrying other people anyway, so it was pointless - except now they have something between them, even though they have nothing more between them. (If you can figure that out!) The movie ends with a very bitter chance meeting between the two of them when the young man finally gets to see his illegitimate daughter.

Watch it for the pretty colors and music, and a young Catherine Deneuve playing Genevieve.