The only film I’ve ever seen that could work in a series featuring La Jetee, Singing in the Rain, and Ran, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg blew my mind tonight. I put off seeing this movie for a long time; most of the high praise notes the unique device that pervades the film (every word is sung) and its highly stylized use of atmosphere and color, so I guess I always thought I needed to save the film for when the mood “hit”. And the mood finally hit. And then it hit the fucking spot.

The use of pure cinema in this film can barely be described. Every single shot is composed with the utmost care, and the camera moves with a deliberate but steady current. Jacques Demy directs the camera like a character itself (perhaps the unseen conductor to the ever-playing soundtrack) and creates a rhythmic cinematic grammar that is completely unique to this film. A smoothly dipping crane shot moves closer to the two love drunk protagonists Geneviève and Guy as they walk home from the theater, discussing marriage and moving closer to one another; a train pulls away from the station as Guy goes off to serve his military term in Algiers and the camera moves with it, but slower, lingering and looking back at Geneviève as she stands too destroyed by love to move from the platform where Guy boarded; and the final moment, an inversion of the earlier crane shot tracing the young lovers, pulls back to reveal nothing hiding outside of the frame, but instead suggests the reveal of a new message, perhaps even of a whole different movie. At this moment it is clear that the cinema of this film truly empathizes with its characters, taking advantage of the power of perspective and movement that only exists in motion pictures.

Of course, there is the score. The music is beautiful and the dialogue never sounds forced. The soundtrack bounces between jazz and lush theatrical numbers, even incorporating the different settings and environments into a diversity of styles. The singing keeps the drama sincere and never dull, even when the story threatens to dip the melodrama into boilerplate Broadway soap opera. It is amazing that this film was shot on location in Cherbourg; Demy creates a world so distinct that it must be controlled on a Hollywood sound stage, but, in fact, it is alive and organic, hot and mild and cold, replete with snow and sun. This freedom within the setting broadly paints the mise-en-scène. The over-saturated colors of Cherbourg keep the visuals rich and engaging, and the impressions of a world transitioning from the 50s to the 60s reveal styles that only exist in modern dreams. Only the elegant and bold reds in Godard’s Contempt, which was made a year earlier, come to mind as a comparison.

And for all the discussion of style, it was the beautifully understated narrative impact that left me with my jaw on the floor. This is not a true-love fairly tale, even if it looks and sounds like one, and somehow the musically enhanced melodrama works to enforce an emotional realism that words can never get quite right. Perhaps most akin to the final shot in Hitchcock’s Notorious, (when you realize that the film is not about espionage and Nazi secrets hidden in wine bottles, but rather something more true and human), the last moments of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg arrested my expectations, defying convention and settling upon a final observation that really took my breath away. The powerful and subtle performances at the very end (coupled with another one of Demy’s effortless crane shots) made me realize that I was not watching the film that I thought I was. I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say that the final message is bittersweet but never manipulative, and that it coolly captures the truth that love moves on even after the heart gets sick and near the point of death. And, for all my love of Hollywood, it pains me to say, but this is the kind of movie that had not yet made its way into mainstream American cinema of the early 1960s, even with the enormous debt it owes to heavies like Fred Astaire and George Cukor.

And sure, this is not a movie that I could watch every day. Just like with a regular musical, the timing needs to be right for such a rich (and often borderline ridiculous) viewing. But The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is not a regular musical, and even someone who hates the high romantic tone of the genre should still see this film; it is a masterpiece that stands apart from anything else I’ve seen. Without a self-aggrandizing or isolating voice, Demy insists that film is a young and ever growing art form art form, and that experimentation can reveal cinematic potential, powers, and textures that we’ve never seen.