Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

I will never forget the first time that I saw Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. I was in my French IV class, and our professor had decided that showing us actual French cinema would ultimately be more culturally rewarding than showing us Dumb and Dumber with the French voice track on, which was also part of the lesson plan that year.

Parapluies is a French jazz opera from 1964. Set against the Algeria’s war for independence from France in the 1950’s, the film follows two lovers, Guy and Geneviéve. When Guy is drafted into the war with Algeria, Geneviéve discovers that she is with child, and her mother begins pushing her towards marrying a diamond merchant who passes through town. The story is an important, beautiful, powerful part of the film, and I wouldn’t dare ruin that for anyone else, so I won’t go into it into too much depth here.

A lot of things about that movie struck me, even as a youth, and it was only as time went on that I began to unravel them. The first and most obviously moving aspect of the film is its score. Parapluies is a jazz opera in which every line of dialogue, however trivial, is sung. Michel Legrand, one of France’s foremost jazz composers, scored the film, and its haunting melodies (which were often translated and reworked into more traditional pop songs in the United States) stand up nearly half a decade later. Besides, there’s something memorable about seeing Guy bounding down the stairs, cheerfully belting out “Merde!” (roughly translated, “Shit!”) to a chorus of energetic, syncopated trumpet riffs. At once playful and tender, Legrand creates an emotionally rich musical environment for the film to play out, and if it is at first a bit disconcerting to hear small talk being quietly sung, it only serves to lead into the beautiful musical tapestry that the film becomes. The score has very few arias in the traditional sense, leaving them behind in favor of a wandering musical undercurrent that flirts briefly with pieces of melodies before moving on to other ideas, leaving you aching the entire time to hear each melody played out in full.

Another aspect of the film that captured my attention early on was Catherine Deneuve, perhaps the closest that arthouse cinema has ever come to producing a stone cold fox. This was a breakthrough role for Deneuve, who went on to acquire enough Palm d’Ors to fill a small house and who may be the only person to retain their critical credibility after playing a lesbian vampire in a motion picture.

But as I got older, I realized that I was watching a really well-put-together film. The cinematography displays great attention to detail, with unique shots of the French coastline and the streets and back alleys of Cherbourg. The other thing that jumps out is the sense of color. The opening sequence shows strikingly vibrant umbrellas being carried through the town, and the clothing worn throughout the film, as well as the décor of the interiors is prominent enough to almost be a character in the movie. The colors used in this film are so impressive that this actually marks one of the first times that I ever paid attention to the visual elements of the film as an art form rather than focusing on the story itself. (I learned recently that the director, Jacques Demy, knew that the film would fade and so made three black-and-white negatives in three different color bands, similar to the old Technicolor process, so that the color would be preserved and that later, the three bands could be brought together to re-create the saturated color of the film. Demy’s widow saw this process to completion for the DVD release of the film. I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought that the color was important.)

Demy’s film also goes beyond the black-and-white moral treatment that seems so common in any form of mainstream storytelling. There are no clear villains – even Cassard, the diamond merchant who tries to woo Geneviéve while Guy is in Algeria, is not an antagonist in any way, even less so if you see Demy’s previous film, Lola, which is actually about Cassard’s life and troubles before his appearance in Parapluies. One of the fundamental messages of the film is that you don’t have to have the fairytale ending,at least not the one you expect, to be happy. It’s not about the overarching triumph of love, or about the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of adversity, or anything like that, but three important things happen:

1. Things don’t turn out the way anyone plans them.

2. That’s okay.

3. I guess this is a bit of a cheat, because it is sort of a film trope, but love comes for people when they absolutely least expect it.

Beyond the novelty of the operetta format, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is a unique spectacle. Magnificently scored, impeccably acted, beautifully shot, the film stands out as a treasure even in the midst of a renaissance for French film. It’s definitely one to seek out.