France, 1967
Directed by Jacques Demy
With Catherine Deneuve (Delphine Garnier), François Dorléac (Solange Garnier), George Chakiris (Etienne), Grover Dale (Bill), François Perrin (Maxence), Gene Kelly (Andy Miller), Michel Piccoli (Simon Dame), Danielle Darrieux (Yvonne Garnier)
A group of fairground people arrive to entertain the French port of Rochefort on Friday; they would leave it on Monday; the constant comings and goings and the ups and downs of the bunch mixing pretty girls and nice-looking boys who are all smiles and fun frame and set the pace to a narrative that is swiftly centered on the titular young women, twin sisters living and working in an apartment overlooking the vast square where the fair is set up.
They soon catch the lustful attention of the two dashing young men running the fair, Etienne and Bill after they quickly struck a bond with their mother, Yvonne Garnier, who happens to own and run a café that is adjacent to the square, a stunning airy and fashionable place made up more of glasses than bricks and mortar (she would call it, disparagingly, the aquarium). But neither Delphine Garnier nor Solange Garnier are really interested in them – they would rather deal with them sarcastically.
As hinted by their first song in the musical, they sung together of course in a delightfully ebullient style, the signature song defining their personas and a key motif of the soundtrack, they dream of another life, away from their quiet but dull routine. The first, sunny and nice images of the sisters in their apartment may have showed smiling ladies satisfied with giving lessons to little girls, Delphine teaching dance and Solange piano, but both yearn for great artistic careers in Paris, waiting for the opportunity to pack.
This goal draws Solange Garnier into the orbit of a shy newcomer with a funny name, a shopkeeper selling instruments and partitions reeling from a heartbreak, Simon Dame. He may be a little in love with her but is definitely convince of her talent as a composer and promises her to arrange a meeting with an old pal of his now a renowned composer and pianist and touring now Europe, American-born Andy Miller. The long-awaited opportunity is beckoning fast it seems.
But if Solange Garnier looks like a practical one-track mind, complete with abrupt or wry comments – at least still she collides with a gentle and seducing middle-aged American roaming the streets of Rochefort over that decidedly very hectic weekend – Delphine Garnier is dreamier and entertaining quite different ideas and expectations. She is the romantic of the duo and hopes to get not only a dream career but also a dream lover. She has given up on the possessive and severe art dealer who has courted her but remains upset by the watching of a portrait she noticed in his gallery, eerily resembling her and made by a young painter who titled it “L’idéal féminin”, The Feminine Ideal – and if the young man, who seems to be in the town, was what she was searching?
It is indeed the same question that has been troubling, saddening, and exciting another patron of Yvonne Garnier’s café, a physically gracious and unmistakably romantic young man doing his military service in the port but spending his free time painting – he is the author of that mysterious portrait that wowed Delphine Garnier in fact. The film, hoping deftly from one character to another, one subplot to another, would often examine the melancholy of Maxence till he leaves both the navy and Rochefort on Monday.
The Garnier sisters’ plan of meeting Andy Miller and making a fresh start is cleverly echoed by Maxence’s own plan to go to Paris and to become a famous painter who could find the incarnation of his feminine ideal. This is the wonderful pattern of the film, the many subplots turning out being parallel moves or revealing parallel stories, while creating a sense of urgency. The willingness of leaving Rochefort shared by so many without realizing it sets skillfully on the narrative a countdown even as lines and events slowly build a web of relations between the characters they are far from realizing. As the fair gets ready and then comes to pass, as characters miss stumbling upon the one they look for or should look for, the audience is constantly teased and put on an edge, wondering if the connections they have become aware of would at last be grasped by those agitating, futilely and funnily, on the silver screen, enabling them to experience true love – the dream lovers eventually being found by the bright but lonely women (and more precisely found again in the case of Yvonne Garnier).
The great narrative skills, peppered with various types of humor (including, in a strange episode, the black one) dispensed with a beguiling freshness, are matched by awesome cinematic and choreographic skills. “Les demoiselles de Rochefort” is a real visual treat offering a pastel-colored and high-octane view of a quaint French town in the grip of the magic and enthusiasm defining a musical. In this Rochefort people are always dancing, dressed in a glorious harmony of complementary colors conveying optimism and bliss, the sky is forever bright, the life obviously sweet even if love struggles to get rewarded. Against the vivid and sparkling background, amid the chirpy and friendly crowds, shot with zest and a faultless precision, the characters perform confidently, conveying naturally the various moods, starting the numbers elegantly and efficiently, delivering in short everything that is expected from a traditional and enticing musical.
This is the great pleasure the film provides: relating so intensely and merrily to the Hollywood tradition, a French production offering its own, straightforward, respectful, adaption, going as far as borrowing to the great studios great names – no less a star and a champion of the musical genre than actor Gene Kelly as well as a younger talent from the “West Side Story” (1961) fame, actor George Chakiris.
And this is why the film may have been so coldly received. Director Jacques Demy had already made a memorable musical clearly inspired by what had been shot since the early 1930s on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, “Les parapluies de Cherbourg – The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” in 1963. Stylistically and visually he actually pushed the envelope even further but he dared to tell a story with a clearly grim background, referring to the bloody and upsetting Algeria’s war of independence as well as sensitive social topics like out-of-wedlock births and crushing differences between social classes and above all refused his lovers the expected happy ending, forcing the brilliancy and the energy of the musical not to celebrate romance but to drive the audience at the core of melancholy and wistfulness.
Despite casting Chakiris who inevitably comes with the emotional baggage of a musical even more gripped by politics and even more designed to be a hopeless tragedy, Demy sticks to the tropes and expectations usually associated by the audience to the genre: he plays by the rules of the game and still pulls off handsomely a nice, alluring entertainment. It is a bit unfair to chide him for doing what he loved in others. And maybe it is a bit misguided: below the smiles melancholy is still lurking; it does not shake up the tropes of the genre but it suffuses the characters’ quests, that is the whole plot. The characters would have no reason to feel wistful as it could be the case with “Les parapluies de Cherbourg”, but till the multifaceted happy ending, wistfulness seemed their only raison d’être: if the miracle of a musical is needed it is indeed because love can be such a bitter disappointment, an elusive goal, a transient illusion.