France, (West) Germany, 1963
Directed by Jacques Demy
With Catherine Deneuve (Geneviève Emery), Jean Castelnuovo (Guy Foucher), Anne Vernon (Mrs. Emery), Marc Michel (Roland Cassard), Mireille Perrey (Aunt Elise), Ellen Farner (Madeleine)
Can a musical made outside the United States go even a bit farther than what has already be produced as far as the dynamic of music within the film’s narration is concerned? At first glance, or rather hearing, it can. Spoken words do not prevail in the narration at all: this quintessential feature of a talkie is bluntly ignored, cast away, erased. Dialogues do not segue into songs: songs are dialogues, period. Characters, the leads and the others, croon their ways through the narrative without respite and without dodging both implausibility and ridicule. It is an all-song storytelling, a quite astonishing idea that has a riveting effect.
Production design on a musical can be lavish, full of flourishes and, when shot with a color stock, morphs on an alluring and striking, even extravagant and overindulgent, display of hues and shades. This is another characteristic element “Les parapluies de Cherbourg – The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” readily borrow to the American style only, it seems, to push even farther the envelope. The colors are bright and dazzling, clashing with one another if needed, shamelessly advertising gender conventions and feelings – pervasive and cheerful pink complemented with purple for ladies, blue and darker hues for gents; Hollywood would have been barely as strident. Even the climate looks more picturesque than ever: the finale takes place in the snowier, whiter, wintrier Christmas that props, special effects, and lighting can plausibly deliver.
Yet there is a huge difference with the genre that emerged in the United States in the early 1930s, trying to exploit what pioneering sound techniques could enable filmmakers to do and wishing to produce the most dazzling entertainments not just to rake up more money but also to make dream a population left in dire straits by the Great Depression. There is no dancing number at all in the movie directed by Jacques Demy (save for a scene where the lovers have some fun in a nightclub after going to the opera). People sing a lot more than ordinary folks but still walk and behave just like them. Spectacle bumps against limitations carefully chosen: fantasy does not extent to the physical realm and the camera is not here to capture pure and delightful movement unfolding inside settings turned into impromptu stages out of fun or emotion.
There are strong emotions in the film but it is melody and voices which convey them, the emphasis getting powerfully and eloquently put on the faces of the characters and everything running across them – closeups are a staple of the mise en scène and characters are at some key moments shot staring right in the eye of the camera, the audience becoming the person they are confessing to. This suits nicely the deeper nature of the film, which turns out to be the other great departure from the genre as defined in the US.
Ups and downs can be many in an American musical with the lead character struggling to make it and even more to find happiness in love. But the happy ending would always come, the ultimate celebration of the joy and sentiment that have pervaded the story and the numbers, the final show of cinema’s power as it self-consciously reinvent reality. But “Les parapluies de Cherbourg” uses the brilliancy of the camerawork and cinematography to underline what the characters experience as they navigate a tragedy that only goes darker and darker, till an ending which is deliberately blunt and wistful.
The lovers would never be together again: a romance ends and will not be revived. This is a sad melodrama, taking place in the background of a long and harrowing war, dealing with an unwanted pregnancy and chronicling an unwanted marriage, demonstrating how practical needs to survive and to carry on with life overcome sentiments once deemed unbreakable. Since the film was released many months after Algeria’s war of independence, it was less of a risk for Demy than what writers and artists, including filmmakers, had to incur (think of the troubles Jean-Luc Godard had with “Le petit soldat” in 1961), yet the topic was so tricky and emotive (after all the war in Algeria brought down a regime, the Fourth Republic, and killed many not just in battles but also in bombings both in the Algerian colony and mainland France and in counterinsurgency violence extending to torture) it looked like a tough sell for the audience. On the other hand Demy has already proved he is not afraid of dealing with controversial women characters: after all Lola, in his 1961 eponymous debut feature, was a cabaret dancer raising alone a kid born out of wedlock while Jacqueline in “La Baie des Anges”, in 1963, was a gambler who neglected her own son.
But if Lola and Jacqueline did find happiness at the end of their stories, the former getting reunited with the man she has always loved (and the father of her son) while the latter follows the man who fall in love with her to break the vicious circle of the roulette, Geneviève Emery remains what the events have compelled her to be, the role model of bourgeois resignation. It was not obvious that Guy Foucher would ever come back from the Algerian battlefields; it was, on the opposite, quite obvious that the shop run by her mother Mrs. Emery could not get them richer and that Geneviève Emery’s pregnancy could raise questions and call for a solution that would help the baby, the mother, and the grandmother, a solution that seemed to have a face with the gentle businessman met by chance in a jewelry, a very elegant and sensitive young man who knows what life means, Roland Cassard. So Geneviève Emery, after griping and sulking, slowly gave in and followed the advice of Mrs. Emery: at the end, she would stay Mrs. Roland Cassard, and never utter any regret. Facing her, Guy Foucher quietly talks about his new life, including his own little family he set up with Madeleine, the quiet young woman who looked after his aunt, Elise, his only surviving relative.
The love that bound them so strongly a few years earlier, over the film’s first part, is now a memory clearly connecting them but without much consequences. The absence of Guy Foucher had an impact, dutifully and delicately explored in the film’s second part, that was too big and corrosive: reinventing their lives was all they could do in the third part. The narrative arc is as simple as it is deeply relentless and merciless. “Les parapluies de Cherbourg” tells how a romance can become a distant past while lovers must cope with hard facts and painful situations. It is quite potent and convincing, and visually unforgettable as the bright colors and catchy songs first impress, amuse, thrill the audience but then drive them at the core of melancholy.