Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg retains its direct appeal to the eyes, ears, and tear ducts after more than 60 years, with an emotionalism that’s shameless but never crass. A melodrama about first love set in the French port city of the title, it stood as a bold reinvention of the movie musical in 1964, just as the genre was beginning a nosedive in its Hollywood birthplace.
It became an international hit celebrated for Michel Legrand’s sung-through score, a primary-color palette that gave its settings the aura of a fairy tale, and Demy’s success in getting audiences to blubber at the pathos of thwarted romance, decorously adding elements like teen pregnancy and prostitution that were unseen in the Hollywood musical. (“Here comes the third hanky,” Legrand recalled Demy gleefully strategizing in preproduction sessions.) If the aesthetics of characters bursting into song was starting to meet with resistance as the Beatles prepared to storm the globe, Demy consciously upped the ante of artifice with his candy-hued spectrum, an entire off-screen cast singing for his lip-synching actors, and in nonstop reliance on his composer’s melodies, both lilting and keening, to carry the plot.
From the film’s first scene in the garage where young mechanic Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo) finishes up his day’s labors, the soundtrack startles, with some big-band swing in the flavor of Frank Sinatra’s contemporaneous recordings with Count Basie as the car jockeys wash up and open their lockers, musically trading everyday banter. One warbles a preemptive crack on preferring film to opera: “All that singing gives me a pain.”
Guy is moony-eyed with passion, and it’s not something that the viewer has to accept on faith. His girl, Geneviève Emery, is embodied by Catherine Deneuve in her breakthrough role, and it doesn’t seem like 20/20 hindsight to intuit as inevitable her reign as a world-cinema goddess with every smile, sob, and gaze she performs as a naïve shopgirl in the umbrella store run by her well-intentioned but hectoring widowed mother (Anne Vernon).
Castelnuovo is dark, dimpled, and sweet, and Deneuve’s breathtaking looks establish a sort of hierarchy between the lovers. When Guy receives his draft notice and packs up for the Algerian war, leaving behind both Geneviève and his dying aunt, Élise (Mireille Perrey), it’s clear that their ostensible future rests entirely on our heroine’s resolve.
If the film reaches an unsurpassable crescendo with the weepiest train farewell in cinematic history at its midpoint, Demy’s visual intelligence and refusal to paint Madame Emery or Geneviève’s new suitor, a wealthy Parisian jeweler named Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), as villains are more apparent once the lovers have separated. The association of black with Roland, from his Mercedes to a wall he’s framed against in the umbrella shop, seems not to translate as deviousness, but as a mark of the man’s own burdensome lost love (an explicit reference to Michel’s role in Demy’s Lola from 1961). And the frequent long takes in the scenes between Geneviève and her mother permit us to notice how Deneuve’s changing costumes and hair suggest that a daughter is inexorably repeating the practicality of her mother’s life choices (both wear fiery red when Geneviève confesses that she’s carrying Guy’s child).
Beneath the jazzy pop and aching strings of Legrand’s orchestrations is laid the brutal essence of a couple’s dissolution: War separates them, and economics makes their reunion all but impossible. Demy doesn’t bludgeon us with the ironies working against the youthful vows of fealty, and he sneaks in some mordant wit, as when Elise informs Guy that her highly eligible nurse, Madeleine (Ellen Farner), is still unmarried: “You know how well behaved she is.” Through The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’s poignant finale, a virtual snow-globe scene in a nighttime gas station, Demy and Legrand give their unhappy love story a depth that, beneath the tinsel and Technicolor, only comes with a beating, broken heart.
Image/Sound
Sourced from the same restoration used for the company’s 2K release of the film, the Criterion Collection’s 4K transfer is absolutely gorgeous. Grain is healthily distributed throughout the film, and the pastel colors are positively radiant. Flesh tones are natural and fine detail is evident throughout. Short of seeing the film on a well-preserved 35mm print, it’s impossible to imagine a better-looking presentation. The disc comes with both the original mono soundtrack and a judiciously remixed surround track that ably distributes the music and singing in all channels without falling prey to the panning issues that often plague mono up-mixes. Michel Legrand’s brassy score sounds particularly rich and enveloping on the surround track.
Extras
The extras here have been ported over from Criterion’s release of The Essential Jacques Demy box set. Chief among these is a 2008 documentary about the making of the film that details its production and lasting reception. There are also archival interviews with Demy, Michel Legrand, and Catherine Deneuve, as well as an interview with film scholar Rodney Hill. A demonstration of the 2013 restoration used as the source for both the 2K and 4K releases reveals the considerable work done to return the film to its original splendor, and a booklet essay by critic Jim Ridley examines both the film’s and Demy’s shifting critical fortunes over the years.
Overall
This UHD release of Jacques Demy’s musical masterpiece is one of Criterion’s finest 4K presentations to date, offering a viewing experience tantamount to seeing it in a theater in 1964.
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