A Weekend of Rainy Musicals
There’s really nothing else like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. A melancholy, sung-through musical with astonishing candy-color design and staggeringly gorgeous lead actors, it’s a singular achievement in musical cinema.
Not surprisingly, the angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this film. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. When the boy is shipped off to fight in Algeria, the two lovers must grow up quickly. Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through lilting songs by the great composer Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.
As film historian Jim Ridley says, “In Umbrellas, Demy found an ingenious way to extend the form of the screen musical, restoring its effervescence in part by reducing its scale to something recognizably human. Rather than surge and lunge in elephantine production numbers, the entire movie would flow on an uninterrupted current of music. The singing and color would evoke the piercing immediacy of first love, even as the abstraction granted a very contemporary distancing effect.”
In recent cinema, the film served as a major influence for Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, as well as Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, but there’s only one The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is also playing on May 31 at 3 pm in The Screening Room.