picture perfect
by
Douglas Messerli
Jacques
Demy (writer and director), Michel Legrand (composer) Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg) / 1964
I first saw Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg upon its
original release in 1964, and I recall enjoying it; I have seen it a couple of
other times since, again taking in its sentimentality—the director himself
admits to his attempt to bring people to tears at the film’s end—without
bothering to consider whether or not to this film had anything serious to say.
This time around, however, the film not
only brought tears to my eyes, but, particularly in its beautifully restored
condition, affected me on a much deeper level. Certainly in 1964, with the US
involvement in Viet Nam, I must have perceived that the central couple’s (Geneviève
and Guy, played by photogenic
Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo)
problems are very much related to France’s involvement during the years that
the film documents (1957-1963) in Algeria. Perhaps I had not recognized,
however, that Demy, in fact, structured his film around the war, divided as it
is into the chapters: “The Departure,” “The Absence,” and “The Return.” It is,
indeed, the hero’s uncontrollable “absence” during his girlfriend’s pregnancy
that destroys their relationship, pushing them both into marriages with loving
but less adventurous companions—in Geneviève’s case, the jeweler Roland Cassard
(Marc Michel) and in Guy’s case, his aunt’s caretaker, Madeleine (Ellen
Farner).
I also perceived, perhaps for the first
time, that their relationship was doomed because of the shopkeeper mother’s
bourgeois values. As one of Demy’s friends tells us in a short film about the making
of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a
woman who is the daughter of a shopkeeper does not marry a mechanic in the
provinces, where Cherbourg lies. And Madame Emery (Anne Vernon), Geneviève’s
mother, makes it quite clear that she is opposed to her daughter marrying Guy.
Indeed, as the mother argues, Geneviève, perhaps,
is much younger that she supposes herself to be. Certainly she does not have
the resolve needed to bear Guy’s slowness in writing letters along with the
pressures of bearing a fatherless child. Her mother’s pressure for her to marry
the wealthy Roland wins out over even her own feelings; and her ignorance what
it is like to be at war, leads her believe that Guy is no longer serious in the
relationship. Geneviève chooses a passivist route, declaring she will marry
Roland if he accepts her being pregnant. Being a reasonable and kind man, who
is very much in love with the girl, Roland easily wins her over.
In a sense, accordingly, the tears that
fall at the end of this sad tale are rather pointless. Both Guy and Geneviève
are perhaps better off with the mates they have finally chosen or have been
chosen for them. Yet we sense in that touching last scene—acted out in the
cleanest and brightest of Esso stations ever in existence—that Geneviève is, as
the French might say, somewhat trist,
a bit resigned by her fate, and that Guy, particularly in his refusal to see
his daughter, waiting in the car, and his statement to Geneviève that it is
time for her to go, that he still feels some bitterness.
A moment later, however, both turn to
their children with obvious joy and pleasure, so that we know that any grieving
they feel is a passing feeling. Indeed, like so many of Demy’s films, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, logically
speaking, ends quite happily.
Perhaps our tears emanate not so much from
the resultant lives of the two major characters, but the exquisiteness with
which their earlier love was portrayed. To me, it now appears, the true wonder of
Demy’s work is not its fragile story nor the soap-opera emotions its characters
call up, but the sheer perfection of the fantasy world that Demy has created.
In The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg Demy has whipped up a Hollywood-like operetta that
even outdoes Stanley Donen’s and Gene Kelly’s lavish spectaculars. If Demy
appears to be blind to the wonders of dance, he makes up for it with a
wonderful eye for color and, along with designer Bernard Evelin, an on-spot
sense of set decoration. Michel Legrand’s lush chords and easy to assimilate
melodies, with its occasional jazz interpolations, demand even less from the
listener than do composers like Gershwin, Loewe, or Bernstein. Despite the
oddness of a full operatic film, Demy’s work seems so perfectly artificed that
we do not for a moment think it unusual.
The
work is so grandly theatrical that it doesn’t even matter, at moments, that the
two lovers float down streets without even moving their feet; or that, because all
actors had lip-sync the pre-recorded score, their movements were so precisely timed,
they were allowed no opportunity for improvisation; or, finally, that in that
last scene Geneviève’s self-described “detour” has taken her more than five hours in the
opposite direction from where she has begun her trip. The Cherbourg of Demy’s
opera is not any more real that the plastic model of the toy Esso station that
Guy keeps in his bedroom. In short, in Demy’s world everything, even the
raindrops, are as carefully timed as the tears Deneuve admits she found difficult
to produce as Guy’s train pulls away. No matter, we cry in her place, not so
much out of sadness for the events of the story I believe, but because we have
to go back now to the real world.
Los Angeles,
November 15, 2015
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