The Young Girls of Rochefort

Jacques Demy followed up his musical masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with a second Catherine Deneuve musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort, a delightful companion piece that continues the throughline of Demy's sustained examination of love, longing, and separation, a thematic current that extends back not only to Umbrellas but to Demy's debut feature Lola. This is a more conventional musical than Umbrellas; not all of the dialogue is sung, and the song-and-dance numbers here are overt breaks in the diegesis as they are in most musicals, and as they weren't in Umbrellas, where the music was smoothly incorporated into the quotidian so that everything was transmuted into song. Despite the differences, Demy, again working with composer Michel Legrand, has concocted another marvelous tribute to the Hollywood musical form, with bright, popping colors, energetic choreography, and musical numbers that burst out of ordinary reality with all the force and beauty of a dream, elegant movements that become dances, open expressions of emotion poured out through song. It's dazzling, colorful, and romantic, and though it's not quite as bittersweet or near-tragic as Umbrellas, that undercurrent of melancholy still drifts just below the surface vibrancy.

This is an exuberant fantasy of love and separation, a film in which nearly everyone has an ideal love, someone they may not even have met, or who they only glimpsed briefly, but who is clearly meant for them, destined to be the great love of their lives. The plot is thus a tightly constructed framework of missed connections and improbable coincidences, constant chance meetings and chance misses in which these would-be lovers careen around Rochefort, searching for love and sometimes colliding with it, or nearly colliding with it and passing by none the wiser. There's very nearly no plot beyond this maze of love and desire, the connections between the characters defined by who loves or lusts for whom, who's destined for whom. At the center of the maze are the twin sisters Delphine (Deneuve) and Solange (Françoise Dorléac) and their mother Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux, the only performer in the film whose voice isn't dubbed for songs). The sisters each have an ideal man who they're searching for without having met him; love for them, as for most of these characters, is an idea before it's a reality, a very romantic Hollywood musical concept. They know exactly what the man they love will be like, and they're simply waiting for their dreams to take shape in reality.

For Delphine, her ideal man will be a sensitive, poetic artist and intellectual, which perfectly describes the sailor/painter Maxence (Jacques Perrin), who just so happens to have painted a portrait of his own ideal woman who looks exactly like Delphine. Throughout the film, these two never meet, though Demy has great fun arranging near-collisions and coincidences that place them just seconds apart, their meeting always imminent — a word that Maxence turns into a pun that he delights in trying out on everyone he meets — without ever actually taking place. That's one source of the film's melancholy, this sense that there's a great love out there for everyone, a soul mate, but that their meeting might not be fated, that in fact fate and chance might conspire to keep them apart rather than bring them together, the precise opposite of the meet-cute conventions of the movie romance.


There's a remarkable shot that prefigures the melancholy of Delphine's story, suggesting that her tale will be streaked with sadness even before she's properly introduced. At the beginning of the film, a carnival is setting up in the main square, the carnies dancing through their preparations, turning their work into choreography. As this number comes to an end, a plaintive, minor-key piano motif slowly replaces the more upbeat tune that had accompanied the choreographed carnies. As the piano melody takes over, the camera begins swooningly drifting upwards, following a few of the carnies as they walk away from the fair ground, and the camera tracks away from them and up towards a window where little girls can be seen practicing ballet. The camera floats through the window and into the studio, where Solange plays the piano while Delphine gracefully strolls between the dancers, instructing them. The combination of the melancholy piano music with that evocatively graceful shot immediately communicates a sense of deep emotions being stirred up, and even though the sisters soon launch into their charmingly upbeat signature tune, that plaintive tune still lingers over them.

That's not the only darkness drifting through the film. As in many of Demy's other films, sailors and soldiers are important figures because war is constantly lurking in the background; as Yvonne says while reading the newspaper, "trouble is everywhere," suggesting the outbreak of war and violence, likely in Algeria, which had so poignantly haunted Umbrellas as well. A café patron says that the soldiers who march in rigorous formation through the streets would "shoot us like rabbits," a rather morbid thought that's contradicted by the presence of the sensitive sailor Maxence, who's consumed by his poetry and his paintings and indifferent to the military maneuvers, simply counting the days until he can return to civilian life. He clearly doesn't belong in the Navy, and one fears for him, fears that he won't be able to escape unscathed.


The many stories of lost loves, missed connections and aborted affairs here are darkly mirrored in the story of an ax murderer who killed a woman he'd loved and longed for many years, suggesting one much more grisly possible outcome for these tragicomic love stories. There's also more than a hint of violence in Delphine's affair with the gallery owner Guillaume (Jacques Riberolles), who tries to force her to marry him even though she says she doesn't love him. Guillaume sinisterly makes his abstract, Pollock-like paintings by shooting at bags of paint dangling over a canvas — when Delphine breaks up with him, he suggestively fires at the black bag — and at one point he turns his pistol on Maxence's Delphine-like portrait of the "feminine ideal." It's easy to imagine Guillaume one day moving beyond such symbolic violence and enacting another variation on the ax murderer's revenge for his jilted love.

Despite this undercurrent of violence and ugliness, the film remains relentlessly bright and sunny, its colors unreally bright and clean, this town a place where even an ordinary stroll down the street becomes a lighter-than-air dance for these hazy-eyed romantics. Solange's destined true love is the composer Andy (Gene Kelly), who she meets on the street by chance, holding a loving glance for a few moments before they separate. Kelly's presence here is the surest sign of Demy's love and respect for the Hollywood musical, and he gives the American actor and dancer two of the film's most dazzling dance numbers, which together encompass the full circle of the film's rapturous approach to love. In the first, after meeting Solange for the first time, Andy is so excited that he spontaneously erupts into an exuberant song-and-dance number, skipping through the streets, engaging in impromptu choreography with passersby, and leaping up onto his car — a white convertible like the one in Lola, since Andy is this film's version of a beloved Demy trope, the masculine presence who's intrinsically linked to his car. It's an exhilarating performance, pure emotion translated into motion and music, the essence of the movie musical. At the conclusion of the film, when he's finally reunited with Solange, their love again takes the form of a dance, a graceful and fluid interplay of separation and togetherness that teases the embrace, the kiss, that finally marks the conclusion of this courting dance, before the couple walks away wrapped in each other's arms.

Fittingly for such a romantic, emotional film, it closes with a happy ending several times over, even if it never quite delivers on the inevitable union of one of its potential couples, just dangling the possibility, tantalizing with it, hinting at it several times before coming just close enough to the actuality of it that the mere continued possibility is exciting in itself. It's a wonderful film, bursting with life and joy, tempering the bittersweet emotions of Demy's previous Umbrellas of Cherbourg with the pleasures of love in its anticipation and its fulfillment.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most moving and heartbreaking love stories in the cinema, an absolutely stunning musical masterpiece that sets its bright, colorful visual palette and sweet, soaring music against an increasingly bittersweet emotional range. Divided into three parts — departure, absence, and return — Jacques Demy's sublime musical is the story of a love affair haunted by the separation of war. Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) is a young girl madly in love with the mechanic Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), but their sweet, innocent affair is torn apart when Guy is called up into the army, sent to Algeria for two years. As in so many French films of this era, Algeria looms large, a tear in the fabric of life, an absence that's felt at home in the missing young men, the years of longing and waiting.

The film is an interesting type of musical in which every single line is sung, but it rarely feels like there's a proper song: instead, all of the dialogue is more-or-less naturalistic speech that's simply sung instead of spoken. Even the most banal lines, like Guy's interactions with customers and his boss at the gas station where he works, are liltingly timed to Michel Legrand's alternately jazzy and romantic music. This style can be somewhat distracting and artificial at first but it quickly comes to seem as natural as if the characters were simply speaking. By setting everything to song, it never seems as if the music is interrupting the diegesis, cutting off the naturalistic flow of life with a musical number. Rather, life itself, with all its joys and tragedies, its banal incidents, its great loves and great sadnesses, has been transformed into one big musical number, a 90-minute musical number that encompasses both the innocent sweetness of young love and the much more complex, melancholy, mysterious loves and losses that build up over the course of the years.

The first part of the movie, which is almost saccharine-sweet with its constant tender embraces and cooing declarations of love, ends with Guy and Geneviève being split apart as he heads off to the army and the war. At one point during their goodbyes, he says that he knows she'll wait for him, but Demy films it in a way that suggests exactly the opposite. Before that point, he'd captured the young lovers in a two-shot, huddling together in a booth at a bar, but then Demy pans right to focus on Guy's face as he stares off into space, away from Geneviève, saying that he's sure she'll wait. Because she's not in the frame, one is left to wonder if he's being presumptuous, demanding that she wait rather than letting her say it herself. Demy then pans back to Geneviève, who demurely agrees, but the damage has been done: Demy's cinematic separation of the lovers at this decisive moment has seemingly fated them to separation in life as well. The camera's graceful movements all but inform us: Geneviève will not wait.


This is followed — after a goodbye sexual dalliance in Guy's bed, next door to the room where his godmother, Élise (Mireille Perrey), lays dying — by the deeply romantic sadness of the lovers' parting at a train station. Demy's camera tracks backward as Guy backs away from Geneviève in the station's bar, a gap of negative space opening up between them, expanded by the camera's movement away from them. Then Geneviève desperately runs to fill that gap, but outside the process begins again, as Guy steps onto the train, which begins rolling forward, Demy's camera tracking along with it. Geneviève follows alongside it for a few more moments, repeating "I love you," but once she stops walking, both train and camera continue rolling along, leaving her ever further in the distance, her figure shrinking into the background as the train departs the station, smoke billowing onto the platform to further obscure her from view.

In Guy's absence, Geneviève learns that she's pregnant with his child, but over time she also realizes that, contrary to what she'd believed, she can imagine herself living without him. Earlier, when Geneviève was grieving over her departed love, her mother (Anne Vernon) told her that, "people only die of love in movies," a line that, since this is after all a movie, would seem to be freighted with tragic foreshadowing. But this is a movie that uses its deceptively artificial aesthetic to cut right to the core of some very real emotions, and Demy has something much sadder and more complex in store for Geneviève than the melodramatic convention of dying from a broken heart.

At the heart of this dazzling musical is the revelation that life is not often as neat as the movies, that the romantic ideals of musicals are seldom fulfilled as cleanly as Hollywood happy endings would imply. At one point, Geneviève sings, "I would have died for him. Why aren't I dead?" She looks right into the camera with a tearful, red-eyed expression, genuinely confused and hurt by the realization that her love for Guy has been fading in his absence, that she's been able to go on with her life and even entertain thoughts about another man, when before Guy left she'd sworn to wait for him forever. She'd imagined that life would be like a melodrama, that she couldn't live without her lover, but she finds that in reality, unlike the movies, memories can fade, life can go on, and there are endings that aren't quite happy, but aren't quite unhappy either, that the sadness and the pleasure of life can be tangled and intertwined so completely that it's difficult to separate one from the other.


The other man who enters Geneviève's life in Guy's absence knows this truth very well indeed. Roland (Marc Michel) is a successful diamond dealer and world traveler who becomes friendly with Geneviève and her mother after Guy leaves. Roland comes to the film several years after the events of Demy's first feature Lola, in which he got his heart broken by the title character of that film and set off on the adventures that apparently made him a rich man. He never forgot Lola, of course, as evidenced by the sequence where he tells Geneviève's mother about his past and Demy cuts away to a graceful circular pan around the market where Roland and Lola had last met in the earlier film. It's a melancholy callback, a metatextual sequence that suggests that film is memory, that to remember Lola is to remember the events and the locations of that other film, briefly weaving them into this new film. Roland's interactions with Geneviève and her mother also recall the earlier film, in that Geneviève's mother is obviously attracted to Roland — as a mother had been in the other film, while he pined over Lola — but Roland is infatuated with Geneviève herself.

Their love affair lacks the passion of Geneviève and Guy's love: Roland courts the girl by asking her mother for her hand in marriage, before he's even spoken much to Geneviève herself. It's a very unromantic affair, and Geneviève's decision to marry him seems to be more pragmatic than anything, influenced by his stability and the fact that he's not swayed in his love for her when he learns that she's already pregnant with another man's child. Their wedding is conveyed with a few economical shots, starting with a tracking shot through a bridal shop filled with mannequins in gowns, in the midst of which Geneviève, staring into the camera through the thin gauze of a white veil, seems as plastic and distant as the mannequins, her expression blank and unreadable. Demy cuts immediately to a very similar shot of Geneviève at her wedding, still staring blankly into the camera, then pulling back to a two-shot of the couple kneeling, their hands piously pressed together in prayer, an image of formally, religiously sanctioned love very different from the passionate clenches of Geneviève and Guy from the film's first section.

Guy also gets his own bittersweet ending, as Geneviève disappears for the film's final section and Guy finally returns from the war with a limp and a haunted expression, only to realize that his love is not waiting for him. Instead, he's gradually awoken out of his self-pity by the patience and caring of his godmother's long-suffering nurse, Madeleine (Ellen Farner), who Demy had repeatedly hinted was harboring a shy crush on Guy. It is perhaps telling that Demy establishes a visual parallel between Geneviève and Roland's wedding and the shot of Guy and Madeleine at Élise's funeral, also sitting side by side in a prayerful posture. As with Geneviève and Roland, this is not a relationship of great passion, and it might be thought that Guy is just settling for a second choice, but Demy intentionally leaves it ambiguous just how much or little he actually feels for Madeleine. This is especially true of the deeply affecting final scene, in which, years later, Geneviève and Guy finally meet again, at the snowbound gas station that Guy now owns and lives at with his wife and their son. It's a beautiful and mysterious scene, overflowing with complex emotions that mostly go unstated in the polite, slightly cool conversation of the former lovers. Demy masterfully resists resolving the tension or answering any of the questions left lingering about these two characters and their paths in life. Instead, they briefly meet and part, separating just as Guy's new wife returns, and Demy's camera drifts up and away, through the fluttering snowflakes, the gas station a little oasis of light in the darkness of the night, as though the happy domestic scene that now plays out is encased in a snowglobe.

Lola (1961)

Jacques Demy's first film, the charming and fleet-footed Lola, opens with a dedication to the filmmaker Max Ophüls, and it's a very appropriate reference point. As with the other directors of the nascent French New Wave — with which Demy was tangentially associated, if not one of the core filmmaker-critics from Cahiers du cinema — Lola evinces a love of the movies in every frame. It's a film swooning and swirling with the desire to live in a movie, to have life fit together into the kinds of intricate puzzle-box plots that drive movie narratives. At any moment, a song might break out, a glamorous girl might stumble back into the life of the man who'd long loved her and never forgotten her, a young girl might fall in love and do something dramatic and romantic, a clueless and aimless young man might get tangled up in a smuggling ring and set off on an adventure, bound for exotic destinations. Ophüls' spirit is felt in the film in the graceful long takes and tracking shots (executed with panache by cinematographer Raoul Coutard) and in the chance collisions and subterranean connections between the characters in this sprawling cast, but the film is just as indebted to the slick, overtly fantastic cinema of Hollywood. Demy's Lola is a whirlwind tour of the director's fascination with Hollywood adventure pictures, musicals, gangster yarns and grand romances.

The Lola of the title (Anouk Aimée) is a dancer at a cabaret, nursing a seven-year aching for her first love, a sailor she'd met as a young girl, who returned to her a few years later, got her pregnant with a son, then disappeared again to make his fortune, promising to return someday. Though Lola doesn't realize it, the film that bears her name actually opens with this man, Michel (Jacques Harden), returning to town after a long absence, glimpsed driving into town in his flashy white convertible and a white suit to match, instantly recognizable as he weaves through the film, intersecting periodically with the characters but always dodging away from Lola before she can see him. This casual intersection of different stories drives the film, as the aimless young dreamer Roland (Marc Michel) by chance runs into the girl who'd been his best friend and his first love as a child, Cécile — who is in fact Lola, so completely inhabiting her sexy dancer persona that no one calls her by her real name anymore, they all call her Lola.

The film is structured around a complex series of unrequited loves and longings. Roland wants Lola, but she's insistent on waiting for the return of Michel, the only man she's ever loved — which doesn't stop her from passing the time with the American sailor Frankie (Alan Scott), who she says reminds her of her own lost sailor. Roland, meanwhile, becomes acquainted with the widow Mrs. Desnoyers (Elina Labourdette), an older woman raising a fourteen-year-old daughter who is, like Lola, named Cécile (Annie Duperoux). The relationships are complex: the widow obviously becomes attracted to Roland, while her daughter Cécile begins spending time with Frankie, developing a girlish infatuation with the older sailor. It is obvious that this younger Cécile is mirroring the life of her counterpart, Lola: like Lola, she spends a day at a fair with an older sailor on her fourteenth birthday, a joyous moment in time that, for Lola, later led to her own child and her current heartache.


Demy, who throughout the film emphasizes the import of one's first love, films the day at the fair for this younger Cécile with a magical, sensual quality that suggests that this memory will be marked in her mind for a long time to come, that it will take on a kind of lingering allure that will haunt her into adulthood. Cécile and Frankie ride on a merry-go-round together, the girl resting her head on his shoulder, smiling and looking up at him, her eyes shining with the girlish fire of her crush. When he gets off the ride, he jumps off in slow motion, seemingly drifting through the air, then picks her up and whirls her over his head, her hair spinning around her face in slow motion, the sun glistening behind her, her eyes filled with pleasure. It's as though this is already a memory, to be replayed over and over again in slow motion as this childish infatuation lingers into the future, leaving only the question: will Frankie someday return as Michel had for Lola, will Cécile's life mirror Lola's as a single mother raising a child that's the fruit of this kind of youthful passion?

These associations between the characters make Lola a rich and multi-layered movie, contrasting the implicit romanticism of its story — the girl who patiently waits seven years for the guy she loves to return — with the difficulties of being a woman dependent on the whims of men. Mrs. Desnoyers lost everything during World War II, her possessions, her home and, she adds as an afterthought, her husband, though the latter doesn't seem to have been a major loss since he was a no-good gambler anyway. As a result, she's raising her daughter alone, just as Lola is raising her son alone, and Roland himself embodies the result of such troubled family situations: he wasn't wanted as a child, growing up in a fractious and unhappy home torn apart by divorce, and it seems to have left a lasting impact on him. In this way, each character mirrors the others, providing visions of possible futures, with the same stories and the same situations repeating themselves with different characters playing the parts. If Lola's story has a happy ending — with Michel's white car finally taking her away in the end — there's no guarantee of similar happiness for Roland, who's walking the other way at the end of the film, heading off towards uncertain adventure, or for young Cécile, who runs away to pursue her sailor, or for Mrs. Desnoyers, chasing her daughter towards a man who may or may not bring her some happiness and stability at last.


The mirroring and repetitions extends into the cinematic reference points of the film. At one point, Roland goes to see the Gary Cooper movie Return to Paradise, which provides another layer of mirrors, with its plot about American military men romancing and impregnating foreign women, then leaving them to struggle on their own. Demy's incorporation of this film is a nod to his American cinematic influences, his love of Hollywood, but it also expresses some ambivalence about the American influence, some uncertainty about the American colonizing of Europe through the movies it exports abroad. More than that, though, Demy is in love with the movies, and in love with the ways in which movies can expand upon and glorify life, can make life bigger and bolder and grander.

When Roland, enamored with the Gary Cooper movie, decides he wants to travel, one woman in the bar where he hangs out says that everything always seems great in the movies, but another responds that life, too, is great. That's a central idea of this charming, whimsical film, in which these characters live their prosaic and troubled lives with the joie de vivre of a fun Hollywood movie, perhaps a musical. (There's a reason the most iconic scene is Lola's flirtatious performance of her own theme song, mugging and posing for the camera as she dances seductively.) These people are very familiar with Hollywood's glamor and its idealized image of life, but they're not always sure where the movies end and life begins. When Cécile tells her mother that she's been hanging out with the sailor Frankie, and that he's from Chicago, her mother responds, horrified, that there are no sailors in Chicago, only gangsters. She's taken the movies for reality, and associates Chicago with gangster pictures, with Jimmy Cagney or Scarface, so that the Hollywood image becomes the reality for those who can only experience a place through the movies. Similarly, Roland's haphazard involvement in a smuggling operation seems like a fantasy — he says it's like something out of a "fairy tale," but he might as well say it's like an American movie, a Bogart adventure picture set in exotic lands, with diamond smugglers and suspicious cops and boat rides and briefcase exchanges. To signal the movie origins of this plot, the soundtrack bursts into a dum-dum-dum-dum chugging suspense theme whenever Roland enters the area where his smuggling contact has his shop.

This is a wonderful and exciting film, bursting with a love of life and a love of movies, and especially a love of how the two intertwine. Whimsical and playful on the surface, Lola has some serious emotions at its core. Though Lola gets her Hollywood happy ending, it's not without a little twinge of regret over the other endings not taken, or without an acknowledgment of all the other characters, whose own stories are left hanging and unresolved.