by James Clark
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) seems to be a simple and exquisite tale of the vicissitudes of young love. A then-unknown Catherine Deneuve seems to carry the whole show on her perfect, stately and fragile shoulders. Jacques Demy has given her the name, “Geneviève,” likening her to the fair maiden of the lore of Camelot with its complement of brave warriors whose care for beautiful presences seems never to have been surpassed. The setting, the French port city ofCherbourg, comes to us in the first shot as all misty, watery, and antiquated. Some time into its actions, Geneviève has a crown placed upon her head by her and her mother’s dinner guest, “Roland Cassard,” whose fortune comprises impressive numbers of high-quality jewels. The crown is golden in color and paper in substance.
There is nothing frivolous about that moment crowned by a party favor. (Having arranged for her daughter to find the “bean” in her dessert, no-nonsense Mom chirps, “Pick a King and make a wish.” Geneviève, lovely and poised as propelled by an actress/prodigy in creating that impression, more than gratifies the already-smitten visitor by gazing into his eyes a quietly declaring, “You are my King.”) It comes at a point when the girl’s protracted anguish at being separated from her lover, “Guy,” due to his having been drafted to fight in the Algerian War, takes on the even darker hues instilled by her pregnancy, and his virtually breaking off communication. The two women, both of whom eke out their living from retailing umbrellas in a snug little shop situated directly beneath the dining room table, had very recently come to a meeting of minds on the subject of where their interests lie. But that concurrence has been struck only after a monsoon-like evocation of pain from seventeen-year-old Geneviève, translating directly into songful declarations of love and lamentations about its being shattered. That situation provides the memorable musical heart of the narrative, but it comes nowhere near exhausting the musicality of this remarkably complex and subtle film as a whole.
What at first viewing might seem to be a handsome rendition of an old familiar experience becomes something far from familiar when followed into the labyrinthine infrastructure it so masterfully exposes for our consideration. What order of love, for instance, is implied by the second and third shots? In the scene directly following that which evokes storied romance, it is raining and we are looking down upon people criss-crossing at a cobblestone square, most of whom are concealed under their umbrellas. The colors, textures and cadences of these presences soon have us delighted by their whimsy, so much so we might not notice a close file of black “parapluies,” purposefully cutting along from left to right. Then we come to the third scene, a garage/repair shop, and a black Mercedes-Benz sedan needing some work. The driver is Roland; the repairman directed to service his car is Guy. It’s closing time, the latter has a date with Geneviève and he tags someone else for that overtime work. What he cannot so easily elude is induction thereby into the distemper, deadly danger and love as proffered by Demy’s haunted compass, always on hand, namely, film noir Kiss Me Deadly. Whereas this prototype’s driver is a barracuda who trips a jack and thereby squashes the mechanic depending on it, Cassard is the gentlest, most inoffensive of men. His netting Geneviève draws attention to the bruising juggernaut of world history within which he has attained to being advantageously positioned, a tide that keys the work to such anxiety that every word has to be sung to counter being squashed like poor Nick, Mike Hammer’s little friend. (En route to marrying the heroine, Cassard tells his future mother-in-law of his past, evoking his failing to win the love of a woman named Lola, a mishap [covered by Demy’s first film, Lola] the full extent of which, involving a stab at smuggling diamonds and acknowledging that an intrinsic coarseness of self-direction locks him into an emptiness [but, quite apparently, a potentially profitable commonness, and one not precluding affection], would help us to see where he stands. Back at the garage, Roland’s vehicle is described as having ignition problems.)
Before turning down Roland, Guy sends off a customer satisfied with his assurance that his motor’s noisily “running cold” is “normal.” Geneviève greets him outside the umbrella shop (for those playing it safe) with rapt protestations of reckless, extravagant love, and then slips into furtiveness about being with him like this, her mother being a cold pacesetter (“I’d be the happiest woman on Earth if sales were a bit more brisk”) and unlikely ever to warm to her relationship with a low-income earner. “I’d go away with you and never see her again,” she declares. Sprung from confinement by way of a lie as to seeing a girlfriend, she joins him at a performance of Carmen, that is to say, regarding an entity not so easily run into the ground by relatives, or anyone else. But the narrative makes clear that Geneviève and Guy are, for all their localized sensual excitation, creatures of the stolid, nuts-and-bolts-driven mainstream. After the show (which, by the way, clearly fails to engage them), walking along a raw and ponderous dockside, they trill forth a nursery-school-like, sweet and bouncy duet in thrall to the prospects of their marriage and life together. She assures him they will have baby girls, since that’s all her family’s genetics is known to produce. Then they turn to how they’ll support themselves, and she reflexively supposes they’ll go into entrepreneurial retailing, specifically centered upon an umbrella shop. He trails out an idea that it’d be nice to own a garage, and she chuckles, “Why? What an idea!” They’re having such fun nothing is taken amiss; but her inclination to essentially regard his public energies as that of a blue-collar nobody gives us pause. They go on to a bar/dance club and jiggle and plod about the floor, yapping all the while, while the music is decidedly tango. (Seated at a table, he, as all that night, chewing relentlessly on his gum, the music changes, she brightens and exclaims, “A mambo!” and they hit the floor in the same spirit as their other effort.) Then she gets shoved around by her mother, on her admitting to having lied and been with him. “You know nothing! You don’t just fall in love with a face you’ve seen in the street!”
The pace of a public avalanche unyielding to private dreams immediately quickens, serving with its pressure the creation of songful cries from the heart. Guy gets his draft notice, Mom gets an equally terrifying reminder from the Tax Man, and, while the lovers stage a series of classic farewell scenes, lukewarm Roland Cassard (a catchy variant of Deadly’s G.E. Soberin) cashes in, first rescuing Mom and the firm by providing some liquid reserves in exchange for one of her necklaces, and then, somewhat later, but still amidst the melodic havoc, rescuing pregnant and (by Guy) virtually forgotten Geneviève who seals a rather chilly deal with, “You are my King.” (Demy’s predilection toward threading, from film to film, not always the same characters but sometimes the same players, comes into play here. In a later musical, Peau d’Ane (Donkey Skin) (1970), Catherine Deneuve plays the part of a medieval princess who, in a convoluted sequence of events, agrees to marry her widower-father, her King. Thus, six years after Umbrellas, he was still about the business of studying and disclosing Geneviève’s faltering intent.) The memorable heartland of this saga of the triumph of Safety First or Settling for Second Best (only, here, who can be sure Guy is a credible First Best?) is crowned by the bucolic melody, “I Will Wait for You,” with its refrain, “Je t’aime! Je t’aime! Je t’aime! (“I love you!”), chiming like a church bell. Two cinematic features of these unrecognized as such death throes deserve some appreciation. As they make their way to Guy’s invalid god-mother’s flat, where he resides, to seize a night of consummation from the forces of loss, their walking along the sidewalk is overtaken by the sidewalk’s moving on its own, carrying them as on a conveyor belt of sorts, like nondescript products of global consumption. (This streetscape and all of the public interiors nearby are marked by bold jagged shapes and biting colors, in contrast to the chic patterning at Geneviève’s, but, as if to say in both cases, “We may be mice-like, but we have some vague idea of what it is to be a giant.”) The second spellbinder takes place at the railway station cafe, with Guy’s train imminent, Geneviève reciting hopeless hopes and inflated grief and endurance: “I’ll hide you… Don’t go… I’ll die!” and revealing a fatal lack of self-direction: “I can’t!… I can’t!” And of course we have “I Will Wait for You,” their duet here, emanating as much from exhaustion as conviction. What gives this scene its extra force is its paralleling the end of substantive love in Brief Encounter. Who knows? But it’s a certainty that Demy and Billy Wilder were allied in other ways (for instance, in admiration toward Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast [Sunset Boulevard being an amazingly witty and haunting take on the burning issue of “more real,” “sur-real”]). So why not in loving Coward and Lean’s modest and haunting masterpiece?
That film’s lovers, Laura and Alec, meet when they have already entered good but not great marriages, and entered upon parenthood, and they conclude that their responsibilities lie there, that they “won’t do such violence to [their] hearts.” (Laura goes on to admit to herself that it is fear of departing the cocoon of wide approval that stops her cold.) That leaves them, on parting forever, enhanced by having touched, however briefly, upon valid though remote regions of nature and its truths. Geneviève and Guy plumb those abysses not from out of careful, mature reflection, but in brief sensual delight and brief shock. She gasps, “Two years of our life! No, I can’t face it!” Her courtship (Roland very considerate about raising with her her and Guy’s child) and posh cathedral wedding (the limo being the black Mercedes, beribboned) takes less than a minute of our time. This course of action, as tracing out to a glamorous marriage) does carry tinctures of heights, but savored and musically performed in a key redolent of verve lost forever, a key not without its own endowment of dignified awe. While still hoping to take encouragement by hearing from revealingly noncommunicative Guy in the desert, she makes her way with difficulty across her street, thronged with happy, raucous townsfolk, costumed and flaring ribbons and noisemakers for the moment of Carnival. On entering the shop she spits out, “I hate the Carnival!” This was a girl who at heart saw no point in living anyplace but a palace (“Geneviève,” after all). She tells her mother—who had several months before told her, “People only die for love in the movies”—“I have no intention of wasting my life.”
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is not the kind of movie where people die for love. After a brief spate of churlishness back home (Geneviève now living in Paris), Guy marries the girl who looked after his now deceased godmother, and he opens a garage by virtue of an inheritance from that solicitous lady. On a December evening, Geneviève, passing through Cherbourg (in a new generation of Mercedes, black, of course) after retrieving her four-year-old daughter from her mother-in-law’s, stops for gas at the station belonging to him. He invites her into his office while the car is serviced in the chilly outdoors (an employee asking, “Regular or Super?” and she, a bit hesitant, deciding on Super). Their eyes have met and each maintains a sombre, gentle reserve, only the slightest touches of resentment passing across Guy’s face. She asks if he would like to meet the little girl. He shakes his head, “no,” and adds, “I think that you can go.” She asks, “Are you alright?”/ “Yes, very well.”
After an instrumental version of “I Will Wait for You” accompanies the departure, we can catch our breath and notice some things. Guy’s wife and little boy return from visiting Santa Claus, and they romp in the snow having been augmented by a fresh snowfall that had been in effect since Geneviève pulled into the property. The property, all modernist angles and glass, glows brightly in the snowy darkness, the way Soberin’s beach house glowed. (The franchise belongs to ESSO; the substance belongs to SO.) The snow resembles nuclear fallout (bringing to mind the nuclear quality of the expanding keyhole opening uponCherbourgat the outset). No one dies, but no one really lives. That, too, represents the musical excitement of a production that, for all its sweet cladding, is, at essence, a very tough cookie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs1NmsA-n-Y&feature=related
How The Umbrellas of Cherbourg made the ‘Elite 70’:
Dennis Polifroni’s No. 4 choice
Pat Perry’s No. 14 choice
Sam Juliano’s No. 14 choice
Judy Geater’s No. 20 choice
Allan Fish’s No. 23 choice
Marilyn Ferdinand’s No. 43 choice
Greg Ferrara’s No. 55 choice
This is one of my favorite musical films and way up there in films of any genre. To me, one of the major themes involves how war changes people’s destinies. That cold reality, combined with the superb music and bright color pallette, make this a most interesting film. Thanks for your detailed piece — and thanks DeeDee for the link to AO Scott’s clip.
Pierre, with your point about the factor of war in this film, you’ve provided us all with a great entry into the musical culture of Demy and Legrand in contrast to classic American musicals. Demy’s career, featuring musicals with music and musicals without music, can be thought of as a continuous skein, as, that is, making the same film over and over again, from various angles. He and Legrand did not, therefore, insert the Algerian war into this vehicle in order to mount upon it a melodrama and geyser of songs to knock our socks off.
The figure, Cassard, features the same actor (not doing any singing in Umbrellas, nor did any of the others on camera), namely, Marc Michel, who plays Cassard in Demy’s first movie, Lola. He was central to a comprehensive array of characters freighted down with an incapacity to pay the price of cogent lustre in their lives. In his second film, Bay of Angels, there is a Cassard-like dabbler with gambling and a woman who heads into self-destruction in being intensely but clumsily devoted to lustre in the form of the roulette wheel. The lovers in Umbrellas writhe within the same demand, and then retreat. The musical expression of their dilemma is graced with purities, and impurities, sending to us a highly
tempered impact.
I, too, want to acknowledge the great work Dee-Dee is doing here. I’m late starting today because we had an appointment about our website, and I’m now even more aware of the complication and skills and hard work going into making a website hum
Dee Dee has worked miracles for that sidebar from the very start.
I came to “Umbrellas of Cherbourg” only recently, and initially had a tough time getting “into” it. Ultimately, I was completely swept up in its romance and heartbreak,even as they were ultimately tempered by cold-eyed realism. I’d heard that Michel Legrand theme a thousand times before actually seeing the film – and always thought it sappy – but the first time that Guy and Genevieve sang it, clinging to each other so sadly and desperately, I was amazed to find how moving it could be – and loved how it was used to haunting effect throughout the rest of the film. That final scene is devastating and perfect. And James, you do a fine job of delineating the film’s themes and references. I’m ready to see this again, right now.
I’d heard that Michel Legrand theme a thousand times before actually seeing the film – and always thought it sappy
Me too, Pat. Soon after the film was released, my introduction to the music occurred via “Hollywoodized” arrangements, which heightened the “sap” factor. But also, as often is the case, a snippet of any film, when viewed out of context, can be misleading. There’s no doubting, though, that Demy intentionally ramped it up at every possibly opportunity, and I’m so glad he did.
Thanks, Pat.
Catherine Deneuve, like Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn, emits in Umbrellas an incandescent poise and verve that convey so much more than a scenario. In being caught up in her domestic distress we are caught up in her cosmic struggles. Demy was more than happy to let her do this job. I’m reminded of a magic moment not long ago during a question and answer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where some of her films were shown. Never given much credit for wit, she nevertheless delivered the priceless remark to her fans. “You know more about me than you think.”
@ Bonjour! Pierre de Plume ….
Vous êtes très bienvenus!
Dee Dee 😉
@Hi! Peter…
Thank-you, very much Peter for the comment and compliment…too!
@ Hi! Jim Clark…
Thank-you, for the comment and compliment too…It’s so nice to make your acquaintance.
deedee 😉
I had this the highest on any of the ballots and I’ll never look back on that. I LOVE this film. The lush colors are a perfect balancer for the rather dramatic backstory that the film tells.
However, what makes this film hypnotic for me is the way the director slowly seques into the musical numbers withoiut ever letting you know they’re coming. At first you’ll notice a sound, then the sound gets repetative, then it gets louder and acompanied by another sound till the rythm begins and the melodies start to emmerge. It’s a work of genius in every way shape and form and its all the more amazing considering the lead had never done a musical of any kind before.
Catherine Denueve is absolutely radiant in this film and her every scene and camera shot falls in love with her (and I with her in the process)…
This ia a big wonderful and deeply probing film afforded a big, wonderful and deeply probing examination by Jim Clark…
BRAVO!!!!!!
Thanks, dennis.
Legrand is still alive—still touring, in fact! I’d love to sit down with him (actually, I’d love even more sitting down with Catherine Deneuve) and try to elicit the nature of his work with Demy, whom he refers to as “my brother.” As you so well recognize, there is a pacing of the soundtrack coming from the demands of a world easily missed. Being so instinctively musical, his logic contains resources of intent he might not want to say much about.
I couldn’t agree more with you Jim-boy. I find the lacing in of the music slowly to reveal its power to be one of the most effective uses of the medium ever…
Yes, it would be a dream to sit down with Catherine Denueve as she is lady I have had a big crush on ever since I saw her in a film called THE HUNGER. Her talent matches her astonishing beauty…
Excellent review my friend. You really captured the heart and soul in this fine treatise…
I left you a few comments under your DRIVE post as well. Saw it last night with SAM and I’m still reeling. Might be my favorite flick of the year thus far…
This is an exceedingly poetic essay by Jim Clark, WitD’s resident Demy authority and enthusiast. It’s an enthralling labor of love for one of musical cinema’s most endearing films, and a longtime personal favorite. I believe it to be Demy’s crowning jewels. Although inspired by the Hollywood musical, this vibrant and inventive film forges the familiar backdrop of a Broadway show or movie premiere to revel instead in the myth and magic in everyday romance in all its sentimental and banal glory. A feast of movement, color and song CHERBOURG transforms the quitidian into a celebration. By inflating the life of a common shop girl into a musical spectacle, Demy succeeds in turning a tedious existence into a fantasy, yet he and cinematographer Jean Rahier and art director Bernard Evein do so without creating a false world. Instead they discover the “poetic realism” in Genevieve’s world of umbrellas, hat, chairs and shop windows.
Michel Legrand’s magnificent scoree is one of the real joys of teh cinema, and the final sequence is sublimity incarnate.
sublimity incarnate.
An effusive phrase, for sure, Sam. — but really on the money. I screened this film for a cousin awhile back, introducing it to her as “the greatest film of all time” (as compared with The Wizard of Oz being “the most beloved film of all time,” etc.).
As I understand it, none of the actors sing their parts, with all of the singing dubbed. Despite this “cheating” (a la Marni Nixon), I consider the acting to be excellent across the board.
Sam, I think you hit the nail on the head with the notion, “poetic realism.” In very soundly taking special notice of the final sequence, you set in relief the dazzlement attaching to Genevieve and Guy’s opting for dimness. In some ways, the depths of their sense of loss there would surpass what they could muster as a couple. I think Coward and Lean appreciated this paradox in producing Brief Encounter.
Demy was unrecognized (even by his wife, filmmaker, Agnes Varda) as a master of problematics. The treasures to be unfurled in Umbrellas are, I think, an inexhaustible legacy.
I’m another one who only came to this film recently and got things rather back to front by seeing ‘Umbrellas’ first and ‘Lola’ later, but it’s striking that Cassard is the man the heroine doesn’t really love in both of the films – though in this one he has money to buy himself a kind of love.
You have given us a lot to think about in your piece, Jim, and your deep knowledge of Demy comes across – I especially like your comparison of the station scene with ‘Brief Encounter’ as that is a film I quite often return to. The snowy ending and the whole theme of Christmas at the end add to the feeling of heartbreak – there seem to be quite a few very bleak Christmas films as well as all those full of merriment. I like the way you contrast and compare some later scenes with earlier ones, bringing out a lot of things I would never have noticed.
Thanks, Judy.
I think Demy, who seems always to have been relegated to the B-list fringes of the thrust of the new (wave), could closely identify with Cassard, a shy, unglamorous sophisticate, close to being suffocated by the weight of scruples he could never bring to communicative bounty. He was valued as a witty eccentric, and carved out a career on that basis. His contrarian positioning gained him some respect but little love. Figures like Lynch, Burton and Wong Kar Wai (whose Christmas motif in his 2046 pays homage to the startling updraft derivable from Christmas shambles putting Umbrellas into a definitive orbit) would check in with his work as “found art;” but he was more a cul de sac to them, than a living presence.
As I have seen Jim Clark’s love for Demy shine through in his previous work, it’s nice to have him take on the task of this big colorful film that for most people is the Demy they know. And he did not disappoint. I am a big sucker for that main theme, by the way.
Thanks, Peter.
I do think Catherine Deneuve was the best thing ever to happen to Demy, a rare instance of his coming into good luck. Had he been more enterprising, and more heterosexual, he might have brought about works with the kind of compelling coherence we see in the association of Antonioni and Monica Vitti.
Jim I enjoyed reading your essay and it brought back all the key plot elements to me as I haven’t seen it in a few years. I ranks at #11 for me on my own list, which I’ll share when we get to the end, so I have a high regard for it. The film’s score is rather remarkable the way the singing is woven throughout the film. Is Catherine Deneuve not one of the most beautiful women to ever grace the screen? She is simply spellbinding here, as in many of her films. She’s gorgeous and heartbreaking. This film screams to me of romantic longing. It is truly one of cinema’s great “romantic” films in the sense that it conveys the romance of cinema for the audience. I remember in college that there was this girl who was going to come visit me for a weekend. Guess what film I had picked up so we could watch? This one of course! I was convinced she would fall in love with me over this film. Haha! Well, needless to say she never arrived. But this film would have worked I’m sure of it!
Jon, I couldn’t be more pleased with your response, as wonderfully fitting into our impromptu Catherine Deneuve tribute! “Spellbinding” is the right word for her forte of affixing her own solitary physical narrative to a film’s interpersonal saga. What with many other actresses contracts to cat-walk egotism, with her expands, due to her capacity to embody an act of “going nowhere” as the most important thing in the world. This little clip from Demy’s Donkey Skin strikes me as a particularly fascinating instance. (By the way, if that girl had shown an affinity for La Deneuve’s surreal disinterestedness, you’d have found a real treasure!)
“What with many other actresses contracts to cat-walk egotism, with her expands, due to her capacity to embody an act of “going nowhere” as the most important thing in the world.”
Haha Jim! Yes very well put. I love it. And your clip does highlight Deneuve’s ability to just “be” in front of the camera and be very happy there.
Nice observations and evocative descriptions of a sweetly melancholy musical. I remember that last moment particularly, and your words help bring it back – what it does, and what the whole film does I think, is remind is of the sublime in the mundane, the transcendent in the disappointing.
Thanks, Joel.
“Sublime in the mundane” is very well put. Demy tended to sign off his films with a stiff shot of wry hopelessness about bringing to bear any sustained sublimity. The last moment of Umbrellas resorts to that downbeat predilection; but the physical specifics of its cumulative motion deliver an emotive charge so arresting that we’re left supposing its fallout would leave a permanent magical residue.
What a rapturous piece of writing! I’d have this at Number 1 if filling out a ballot.
Thanks very much, David.
Demy’s films are an acquired taste due to their refusal to let good times roll at the expense of hard and uniquely rewarding difficulties in nature. Speaking of which, I’m at work these days on the Coens’ A Serious Man, as off-putting as a movie can get, and yet with a vein of massively hidden gold.
Fantastic issues altogether, you simply received a emblem new reader. What would you suggest in regards to your post that you made a few days ago? Any positive?
Thanks for your reply to both films, and especially thanks for touching upon the sensibility of an auteur I’m very fond of, Jacques Demy. I’ve been trying to make the case, with regard to several films, that Lars von Trier is likewise in awe of Demy’s enrichment of the Surrealist initiatives of Jean Cocteau.
You could say Demy’s is a muse bent on the glories of a very tough kind of love. But you’d have to be careful not to miss his capacity to keep aflame love in all its splendor and tenderness. In light of this input, I find in the tortuous struggle of the woman in Antichrist (or the woman Antichrist) dimensions of plangent affection, far more powerfully conveyed by her body language than her verbal language.
This situation, as I see it, brings to full force the irony that von Trier is often regarded as a dangerous pervert, while the desert-like Bresson strikes many as fit for sainthood.
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