Les parapluies de Cherbourg

Plot synopsis:
=== Part One: The Departure (November, 1957) ===
Madame Emery and her beautiful 17-year-old daughter Geneviève (Deneuve) have a tiny and struggling umbrella boutique in the coastal town of Cherbourg in Normandy, France. Guy (Castelnuovo) is a handsome young auto mechanic who lives with and cares for his sickly aunt and godmother Elise. Though Geneviève's mother disapproves, Guy and Geneviève are deeply in love; they plan to marry and name their first child "Françoise". At the same time Madeleine (Ellen Farner), a quiet young woman who looks after Guy's aunt, is secretly in love with Guy.
Guy is drafted to serve in the Algerian War. The night before he leaves, he and Geneviève pledge their undying love and have sex, perhaps for the first time.
=== Part Two: The Absence (January, 1958) ===
Geneviève learns she is pregnant and writes to Guy, but his replies are sporadic. Her mother tells her to give up on Guy – he has forgotten her. Geneviève is courted by Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), a kind, young, and very wealthy Parisian jeweler; he wants to marry her despite her pregnancy. (In one of the connections among Demy's trilogy of films, Roland had previously unsuccessfully wooed the title character in the earlier Lola (1961); now he relates a version of this story to Madame Emery.) Madame Emery urges Geneviève to be sensible and choose a secure future with Roland. Geneviève marries Roland in a great cathedral, but she appears ambivalent about her decision.
=== Part Three: The Return (December, 1963) ===
Returning from the war, Guy learns that Geneviève has married and left Cherbourg. He has difficulty readjusting to civilian life. After an argument with his boss he quits his job, goes drinking in a seedy bar, and spends the night with a prostitute. When he returns to his apartment, Madeleine tells him that his aunt Elise has died.
Guy sees that Madeleine loves him, and he rebuilds his life with her help. Using the inheritance from his aunt he opens a new "American-style" gas station. Madeleine agrees to marry him, though she wonders whether he is merely on the rebound after losing Geneviève.
On a snowy Christmas Eve, Guy and Madeleine are in the office of their gas station with their small son, François. Madeleine is decorating a Christmas tree; we see this is a loving and happy family. As Madeleine and François leave to visit Santa Claus, an expensive car pulls in. The mink-clad driver is Geneviève, now wealthy and sophisticated. She has a young girl with her. As Guy rounds the car to her window their eyes meet and there is a moment of awkwardness.
Geneviève gets out and Guy invites her into the warmth of the station's office. They chat as a boy attends to Geneviève's car. This is Geneviève's first time in Cherbourg since her marriage, she says. Her mother died recently. Looking outside at the girl in the car, Guy asks, "What did you name her?" Geneviève answers: "Françoise. She's a lot like you. Do you want to see her?" Guy shakes his head.
The car is ready. At the door Geneviève pauses: "Are you all right?" Guy says all is well with him. Geneviève opens the door and pulls her collar tight against the cold before looking back at Guy one last time. She walks to her car, gets in and drives off. Madeleine returns with François; Guy greets her with a kiss. As the camera pulls back he frolics with his son in the snow, then picks him up and follows Madeline inside.

Tags: cult, romantic

Review:
A technicolour heaven with a young Catherine Deneuve at her most beguiling and beautiful in a film that's entirely sung in the most exquisite way?
All the cast are brilliant - charming and charismatic; the production design looks like a psychedelic gingerbread house; the score is exceptional; the singing genuinely heart-felt and moving; and the whole thing is carried off with such effortless confidence and unreserved joy that it's impossible not to fall in love with it..
It IS a happy ending (sort of) but the emotions of the two characters really tear you apart.The acting is good, the film moves quickly (90 minutes) and--quite simply--this is one of the best foreign films ever made.
The film is quite heartbreaking because Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) did not persevere in her love for Guy. I can only imagine what pain Guy had to bear facing war in Algeria knowing his fiancée back home was pregnant with his child and he couldn't do anything about it.
There is nothing particularly new about the plot, which is a straightforward and uncomplicated love story divided into three acts, but the beauty of this film is in the telling of it.All the dialogue in this film is sung, which at first is a little unsettling, but it actually takes very little time to adjust to.
It's a totally original film (at least from what I've seen); so original, in fact, that at first it's kind of off-putting -- the artificiality of the bubble gum colors (in the first segment, as they change slightly as each moves into the next), the constantly moving camera, and the fact that all of the lines are sung makes it hard to get situated within the film, for the same reason that you turn the car radio down when you're driving down a street trying to read house numbers.
(Though it should be said that Demy never once sacrifices the pleasure he creates, nor does he fall into any stale conventions, even while his story is based on the oldest of movie clichés -- wait for me!).I hesitate to use the word melodrama, but that's essentially what the film is, both for the meaning of the word "melo" (music) and for the heightened emotions brought on my the music.
Deneuve's loveliness as a young woman keeps us from responding to much aside from her beauty (and she starts off as a typical love-struck sixteen year-old), but by the end she's quite a different person, and to overuse a term applied to Deneuve, she becomes elegant.
It is a Gallic version of "Romeo and Juliet" by way of William Inge's tale of teenage lust, "Splendor in the Grass" (in fact, Demy's ending bears a striking resemblance to the last scenes of Elia Kazan's film three years earlier).The plot focuses on teen-aged star-crossed lovers Genevieve and Guy, who develop a relationship through clandestine meetings despite the disapproval of Genevieve's mother, who thinks a gas station mechanic is beneath her daughter.
Anne Vernon lends a robust presence as Genevieve's mother as she plots her daughter's fate, and Marc Michel is appropriately bland as Roland.Along with the vibrant colors faithfully recaptured in a 1996 restoration, such artifices really add to the film's charm.
A haunting and beautiful experience.*** Spoilers follow *** Guy's decision to forego an embrace with the daughter he has never seen has to be one of the most moving moments in film.
Absolutely wonderful French musical featuring twenty-year old Catherine Denevue singing every word of dialogue along with a cast of well-known (at the time) French actors.
After all, I really like French films.The story concerns the love between a young girl and her slightly older boyfriend who is called up for military service.
So beautiful and engaging that I found myself in tears as the movie concluded--and the ending is one of my favorites in film history.
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is a unique film that incorporates all that is good in movie making.
Imagine the pitch to `le studio`: A realist Algerian wartime romance set to music with all dialogue sung `en francais`, which takes place in the nondescript fishing port of Cherbourg...Strange, then, that "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" is a milestone of  European cinema.
At the same time, however, the director addresses universal themes of love, absence, opportunity and regret.The glimpses of Cherbourg are tantalizing, and somehow achingly beautiful for anyone who has ever spent any time there, and the color palette is simply stunning.Catherine Deneuve looks stunning too (she never looked quite like this again - even in the second half of the film she has already changed).
The simple plot is carried along, at least in the first half, by the convincing nature of the relationship between Deneuve's character and her mechanic boyfriend.The film is slightly spoiled, however, by the rather disjointed plot in the second half, and the lack of variation in some of the sung dialogue (in fact there are no spoken words in the entire movie).
The best music comes in the scene at the railway station, which somehow manages to feel emotionally authentic despite being so stylized.So watch the movie if you can.
After a while of watching the film you forget the dialogue is entirely composed of song, and even though there were no songs that i went away humming from this picture, the images slowly became something other than film, and the songs became something other than song.With Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Jacques Demy created something entirely new, something no other film maker has been able to achieve with film and music.
Sure the great silent films of cinema's early days were able to achieve an atmosphere of people worship to which the entire film making industry the world over still suffers and although there was no dialogue and very little music, sometimes accompanied live with the showing of the film, silent films were never as Magical as this, simply because i have watched a few...
But I must confess that I was a bit worried before watching THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, directed by Jacques Demy and starring the wonderful Catherine Deneuve.
Watching it, I discovered one of the most lovely and beautiful films ever made, and also one of the most realistic musicals.
The story is extremely well-done and the movie has THE best ending I've ever seen in a romantic film.
The beautiful music, the lovely singing, the bright colors and the gorgeous young couple betray the harshness of life in Cherbourg.
Also the music does create interesting mix of jazz, instrumental and classical tunes, which are merged with the spoken language of the characters.The characters of the movie reveal tragic social changes in lives due to different social status (mechanic, the daughter of the lone mother, the jeweler who had tragic love affair, the ill old woman).
Because of that it is shown that young people suffer.The work of the film director, and other people is interesting to watch because of different camera angles, very colorful interior of the houses, and atypical for the French or American musical end of the love story.A musical worth watching and thinking about the message..
There is a beautiful photography colored with taste and lyricism but without realism; courageous idea of singing simple, ordinary words during whole film; incredibly beautiful music of Michel Legrand and not worse, lovely Catherine Deneuve as a naive teenager fallen in love.
Les Parapluies are color, real color like nobody give us before(color as statement),is songs, never before a film was entirely sung, meaning every simple dialogue, a simple yes or no, is sung, is happiness but no an artificial one, happiness surrounded with problems like in real life; is locations that everybody knows(like a garage) in a middle of a musical, is the intelligence to tell a story beyond the easy plot solutions full of violence of these days; its a film that your old auntie can enjoy beside you and both can obtain something great for your own lives.
Wonderful music, beautiful love story.
Some of the songs are wonderful, the kind you can't keep from humming for days afterwards.You have to know a little French to enjoy the movie fully, it certainly wouldn't work in another language.
I'm not too much of a French speaker myself, but the singing actually makes it much easier to grasp the words.Ok, I admit, the young Catherine Deneuve was one of the reasons I watched the movie in the first place, and I wasn't disappointed, she's truly magnificent.
Demy challenged himself in a simple way here; portray an ordinary life of hindrance and difficulty as we might know it, so a melodramatic plot about a love affair that is quashed by distance, and layer this through the desire to flow to a further distance than just hurt; release.So he makes opera, the plot is fully sang, colors are fierce and bright in celebration of a life that we would like to be in this other way, more musical than it is and yet this desirous life breaks down on the way.
But the choice, to deliberately echo things we may have known from a previous life (if only we have lived through that previous life), factors in what we're saying, about drama - internal narrative - that continues to echo.And more tantalizing is to note how a third film, Le Bonheur, annotates this one and the last scene, made by the wife of Demy, Agnes Varda, obviously inspired by the work of her husband and released a year later.
Stars Catherine Deneuve as Geneviève, the story is about her and her boyfriend Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) who wants to marry her, but has been drafted in the Army to fight in Algeria.All elements converge to create '60s French magic as much sweet sorrow's invoked.Also here is great cinematography and it should be said this is not one of those schmaltzy Rogers and Hammerstein-type musicals...well just a bit of schmaltz, but the plot's got an edge, as does the style.
Proof that style can transcend plot, Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of my favourite films, even though its simple story of lost love is nothing special, though very moving and uncliched in the way it develops.
It's about young love that just can't be because of a disapproving mother, a war, and a mild surprise in part 2.The film in one way is a novelty since ALL of the dialogue is sung.
merci" it develops into a beautiful tragic love story with enough room for you to make up your own mind as to what went wrong.The sets / costumes are beautiful (never thought I'd say that in relation to a movie.), Catherine Denevue is gorgeous (lets face it, she still is 36 years on!) and the music is wonderful.Take my advice - if you haven't already seen it, go out and buy the DVD!
The story is on the level of soap-opera, the music is generic French-ballade (the main tune seems to be a rip-off of the folk-song Moscow Nights), but the pictorial composition makes this film worthwhile.
Every frame should be studied by decorators and dressmakers,and constitutes an art-work in its own right.It's novel the way every line of dialogue is sung, while sounding thoroughly natural, though Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1992) manages the same thing with much more force.Recommended for its visual beauty, but don't expect to be swept away by it..
The American musicals of the 1950s obviously influenced this film quite a bit, and that genre was already nearly dead in the world as filmmaking began to move into the more artistic (American) films of the 1960s, like Bonnie and Clyde or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The gimmick, to have every line, no matter how mundane, sung by the actors, is interesting at first, but after about 30 minutes, it gets old.
Remember the color schemes in the extended "musical number" sequence near the end of Singing in the Rain where Gene Kelly proposes the grand finale of the film they are making?
And the film is aware that it begins as a movie love story, addressed by the fact that the protagonist genuinely expects to die if they are parted.
And the music (especially main theme) is so hauntingly beautiful it really does make you want to cry when you hear the first notes.The coloring is like in no other film.
And the music (especially main theme) is so hauntingly beautiful it really does make you want to cry when you hear the first notes.The coloring is like in no other film.
I love musical films and movies with romance, so The Umbrellas of Cherbourg when I first saw it a year ago was more than ideal.
It is such a beautiful movie, in the gorgeous music- one of my favourite movie musical scores actually-, the colourful visuals, the charming and touching(if slightly convoluted occasionally)story and Catherine Deneuve at her most irresistible.
It's a nice complication, and quite subtly done.I really have little more to say, but I see I must have at least ten lines, so I will also admit that the music of this piece will haunt you for the rest of your life, and it doesn't hurt that you get to spend 90 minutes in the company of one of the most beautiful women in the world--but I did wonder, at times, if she actually sung those lines..
Everything is perfect, the opening scene with the rain and umbrellas from above, the colours, the music (Legrands) the location and the cast (Deneuve is so lovely).
At the end of "Lola",Roland (Marc Michel) is rejected by the heroine.We find him back in Cherbourg,where he will play an important part in the plot."Les parapluies de Cherbourg" is an unique movie,not only in French cinema :it extended the Musicals concept by using an entirely sung dialogue.It does not work without some ludicrous lines ,which the non -French -speaking audience cannot notice.Singing in a garage about a "broken-down" car would be guaranteed to net nothing but horselaugh..but there's the magician Demy,abetted by talented Michel Legrand.Legrand's score integrates snatches of Bizet and the great organ during the wedding scene.The scenery is bright,with vivid colors.The town is daubed with green and blue pastels,candy pink and mauve.All the actors give successful performances, Anne Vernon iis as effective as her daughter Deneuve.Strangely,the characters recall the thirties Pagnol movies,and the ending has got something from "splendor in the grass".Demy would try to repeat his sung dialogue in "une chambre en ville"(1984) ,but time had passed and the main drawback which was mastered in "les parapluies (singing about things that are too down to earth!)ruined the eighties work.NB:The lead female part was intended for a real singer ,Isabelle Aubret.Because of a car crash,she was not able to play it..
Even though the movie looks very bright and cheerful, the story is actually quite dramatic and also doesn't progresses in a way that you would expect from a romantic musical.
The Winner of Cannes Film Festival's Golden Palm in 1964 and five times Oscar nominee, Jacques Demy's/Michell Legrand "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg", is a superb romantic movie.
The movie made a superstar out of 20 years old Catherine Denueve as teenager Genevieve, a girl madly in love with Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), a garage mechanic.
I have not seen the film for long time and should admit that while re-watching it last night, for the first ten or 15 minutes, I had some doubts and reservations about constant music and singing that make The Umbrellas of Cherbourg more of the filmed opera than a musical.
It's films like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg that are examples of how beautiful cinema can be.
Whatever your views are on French cinema, or musicals, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is capable of dismissing them with its romance and color..
From the bittersweet singing, to the intriguing camera positions, to the story which is romantic without ever becoming melodramatic, to the music -a masterpiece in its own- , to the atmosphere, (watch that final scene with the gas-station in the snow and you'll get the point) all is styled so delicately.Sure, you've got to get used to the format.
I'd rate the film at two stars for the color photography, the beauty of Deneuve, and the two songs "I Will Wait for You" and "Watch What Happens," both of which are merely used as musical background to accompany some incredibly trite and silly dialogue.
By contrast, in 'Les parapluis' the team of the director (Jacques Demy) and the composer (Michel Legrand) for the first time decided to produce a work in which the sound should be 100% film music.
The story is about a lovely young woman, played by Catherine Deneuve, who works with her mother in an umbrella shop in the wet, coastal climate of Cherbourg in France.
This movie is most beautiful french film i ever seen !
The music, the singing, the characters, the colors, the romance, the heartbreak - no, this isn't "La Bohème", this is "Les parapluies de Cherbourg"...
If it were a North American movie, with the same story, the ending would be different, the unfolding of the film itself would be different and everything would end up in a happy end, even more for a musical.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a beautiful and melodramatic take on a French romance in musical form.
It is everything that a filmed romance should be, an amazing sung story of lost love, with a poignant ending that is--depending on your viewpoint--sweetly happy or deliciously sad.If you haven't seen it yet, don't wait--see it now on DVD.
Other actors like Nino Castelnuovo Anne Vernon fare well, but if there's a reason more people watch the film today it's for Deneuve, and maybe for the bright colors and ironically sunny music.
If there is a reason to keep your eye on the movie, it's because France looks beautiful throughout the film.