The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

I've read that Damien Chazelle's favorite movie is 1963's THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG.  Anyone familiar with it and Chazelle's LA LA LAND will see some similarities.  Similarity of concepts.  Certainly not execution.  Director Jacques Demy created a musical that positively leaped off the screen with a kaleidoscope of color and art direction, with every line of dialogue sung (albeit recitative) to Michel Legrand's near operatic and classic scoring.  But it's oh so bittersweet.  Chazelle tried to ape this style with his ode to the City of Angels.  For me, it failed.

What makes Demy's movie work so well for someone who saw LA LA LAND first?  Even after years of imitation and homage, THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG feels unique. In its own class.  It's not a typical MGM musical with contrived complications leading to a happy resolution.  It's a synchronicity - Demy's screenplay, an admittedly familiar tale of young love tested by separation, blends in some perfect way with the aforementioned elements.  The incongruity of all the sharp pastels of umbrella shops, cafes, and even dingy rooms and the ultimate fate of Genevieve's (Catherine Deneuve) and Guy's (Nino Castelnuovo) intense romance just works.

Describing why isn't so easy.  Granted, by the flawless final scenes, a beautiful snowy white landscape serves as both a final blanket of death for one romance and the pastoral calm of another.  I loved that.  It may well rank in my Top Ten Final Scenes ever.

Demy also achieves something curious - a certain discomfort and unease from the very first moments.  Madame Emery (Anne Vernon) even asks why her daughter is so fidgety at film's opening.  She's anxious to see her lover, and Demy sustains that anxiety to just before that beautiful closing, when our lovers have reconciled their fates.  Prior, we move through the film's three chapters, "The Departure", "The Absence", and "The Return" with a certain nausea of the inevitable.  Guy is drafted to fight in Algeria.  A wealthy suitor meanwhile asks for Genevieve's hand.  Everything is indeed sung, and for some viewers this will distance them from the drama.  For me, it enhanced it.  Almost a statement on the characters' attempts to make something sweet out of their sad lives.  Nervous hope.  Even when their outfits match the walls.

The pathos is what really makes THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG effective.  This is a highly moving story, worthy of misty eyes.  Chazelle almost achieved something like this with his climax in LA LA LAND, but by then it was too little too late.  Few have been able to make a successful filmed musical in the last decades.  None ever made another like Demy's.  So patently artificial, yet feels so damned realistic.