The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Cherbourg, a French town on the English Channel)
is the main song of the eponymous film of 1964 of the French director
Jacques Demy, an original experiment of a musical movie in which all the
dialogues are sung.
A much loved movie and never forgotten. The interpreters were the young
Catherine Deneuve (in her early twenties, he had already released movies
8-9) and Nino Castelnuovo, who had just interprted the part of Renzo in
the historical TV drama The Betrothed for the Italian television.
The plot was very simple, Genevieve (Deneuve) seventeen year old
daughter of a widow , who owns an umbrella shop (a very suitable item in
the seaside town , where the weather varies greatly ) and Guy (Castelnuovo),
a mechanic, loved each other dearly , but their love was obstacled by
her mother , who considered her daughter too young and the guy not
enough rich and not at his level . He leaves for military service (two
years , at that time ) and she discovers she is pregnant . During the
long wait, the girl is not comforted by any letter from him ( engaged in
a war zone and unable for various reasons) and in the meantime the shop
has problems and is detected by a young jeweler Roland, who has long
been in love with Genevieve , and is willing to love her and raising a
child that is not his . The wedding comes as a logical consequence, the
store is sold and the new family leaves the town . When Guy finally
returns from the military service is unable to find Genevieve and
moreover his adoptive mother , with whom he lived, is dying. The girl
who helped the mother , Madeleine , was already in love with him and the
two , inevitably , get together and get married . Of course it does not
end here , a few years after Genevieve casually back to Cherbourg and
meets Guy , and this is the last , sad , scene: the two lovers realize
how much love they had in their hands a time, and that happiness is lost
forever. |
It
is therefore not the story itself, based on the clichés of melodrama and
identifiable in advance and easily by viewers, for making this a
memorable film. They were other factors: the extraordinary beauty of the
images, the two beautiful actors (primarily Catherine Deneuve, gorgeous
as ever), the proposition of non-trivial questions, such as the
continuing importance of class differences in marital happiness, the
opportunity for a young person (the protagonist is seventeen years old
at the beginning, a teenager ) to understand and choose their personal
path to happiness, and the responsibility for the adults (especially if
they do not experience this happiness or have little known of it, as is
the case of the protagonists of the film) to drive them toward wise
choices, but that can preclude future happiness, the realism of the
choices which then results in a regret for life; questions and issues
proposed to the spectators using the themes of melodrama (or of the soap
opera, we would say now) as "building blocks" of the story. |
And finally, above
all, there is a choice of language rarely attempted in a film in such a
radical way: all the dialogue, without any exception, are sung, with an
effect of deliberate contrast with the realism of the setting. Then it
acquires decisive importance the beautiful soundtrack, due to the
composer Michel Legrand, the favorite musician by the directors of the
"nouvelle vague" of French cinema of the 60s, full of memorable moments
and moods steeped in jazz. |