Sing a Song of Passionate Romantic Turmoil With The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

There were a whole barrage of live-action musicals in the mid-20th century but none of them were quite like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  A 1964 directorial effort hailing from French filmmaker Jacques Demy, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, much like a typical opera and in the vein of certain beloved Broadway musicals such as Les Miserables or Hamilton, is wall-to-wall singing, everybody communicates through song, there isn't a note of speaking to be found here. Interestingly, unlike Les Miserables or Hamilton though, which have characters solely singing in traditionally organized musical numbers, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg makes no use of the usual parts of conventional cinematic musical numbers.


There are no elaborate back-up dancers to be found here and the characters don't break into neatly structured rhyming verses when it's time to sing. Instead, the characters exchange typical dialogue but just sing it out in an unrestrained style. Though they don't adhere to typical structures of movie musicals, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is certainly unashamed of being a musical as it tells its three-part story chronicling the love affair between Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo) and Genevieve Emery (Catherine Deneuve). They're two youngsters in passionate love despite the disapproval of Genevieve's mother, Madame Emery (Anne Vernon). Tragedy strikes the pair of lovers when Guy is drafted into a war that takes him far away from home for years.

This leaves Genevieve in a troublesome pickle as she's pregnant with Guy's child and her mom insists that the child needs a father. That's the kind of heightened plot turn that should indicate to you (as if the rampant singing didn't already clue you in) that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a mighty grandiose kind of feature. In terms of its filmmaking and writing, it decides to approach the experiences of young lovers constantly set ablaze with fervent passion in a similarly zealous manner consisting of its pervasive musical sensibilities as well as story turns that are always played up with as much dramatic splendor as possible. The end of days for the Emery family seems to be around the corner for whatever decision Genevieve makes, there's always a new personal mountain that this character and her mother are being forced to climb.

I once described watching Mulholand Drive as an experience akin to getting into a pool full of cold water in that it takes a moment to get used to but once you adjust to it, you never want to leave. That feels like an apt point of comparison for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as well given that I had to rejigger myself to its unique approach to musical cinema but once I did, I got totally immersed into this one, particularly on an emotional level. Though the process of belting out every piece of dialogue with such energetic musical passion, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg has its character not so much experience romance or other vibrant emotions as dive-head first into them and I'll be darned if I didn't find myself diving right in alongside with them.

The story is told through a visual scheme reliant on a cavalcade of bright colors that make the world of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg absolutely pop, you couldn't find a greater assortment of beautiful bright colors in any Crayola crayon box. This color scheme gets put to particularly good use in the costume and the production design. In the latter element, every environment in the story, from Madame Emery's fancy shop to Guy Foucher's more run-down apartment, is draped in vividly colored wallpaper that dazzles the eyeballs. Interestingly, the impressive production design comes off like a direct precursor to the kind of stunning-looking sets you'd see in a Wes Anderson movie, certainly, Madame Emery's shop especially feels like a place M. Gustave could easily pop into.

Lead actors Nino Castelnuovo and Catherine Deneuve also impress with their lead performances, which are made all the more excellent considering how difficult of a movie this must have been to film. Much like the performances in Moulin Rouge!, the two lead turns in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg constantly had me impressed with how good their performances are considering how this is the kind of movie that can't really come together until post-production is complete. The whole idea of this movie is more than a tad absurd on paper and I'm sure performing these highly pronounced performances live on-set was similarly bizarre. it must have been quite the leap for Castelnuovo and Deneuve to just trust Jacques Demy and his crew with ensuring their performances would fit into such a unique musically-informed creative vision.

That creative trust was well-placed given how Castelnuovo and Deneuve find the perfect acting groove to fit this particular story and aesthetic. Both of them share engaging chemistry that sells their characters affections for one another while neither of them hold back in performing the most grandiose moments in the stories of their characters. I especially enjoyed Deneuve's performance since, among a multitude of noteworthy qualities she brings to the part, she injects a wry sense of rebellious humor to her character that serves as a successful contrast to her more worry-driven mother. Both of these lead actors especially excel in an unexpectedly bittersweet final scene that sees their romance coming to a realistically imperfect ending. In this closing sequence, Castelnuovo and Deneuve's performances use the musical sensibilities of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to unearth potent pathos that lends emotional substance to this delightfully unorthodox approach to the cinematic musical.